Month: August 2011

Day 6: Taking a “rest”

Amanda Xi

Today’s inane image of the day:

One of my favorite study tools… ever: notecards! As you can see, I have begun stocking up.
I had mentioned in a previous post, I’m going to try to keep track of the number of days that go in to each stretch of my medical training. This first stretch will be my undergraduate medical education (apparently the medical community refuses to let us move up to graduate level until after we have our M.D.). Why did I count today? Well, because I did work for medical school today.

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Day 4…

Amanda Xi

This is what I’m [attempting] to read [for TBL tomorrow]:

While interesting… it isn’t that riveting of a read [did I mention that it’s 33 pages? And that I had to tackle Robbins and Cotran’s “Pathologic Basis of Disease” prior to it?]

In other news, we did get shiny new Beaumont hospital badges today [no medical student white coat is complete without some sort of identifying tag]! I’ll post an image of it tomorrow… when I catch up on life and all.

Thoughts from Day 2

Amanda Xi

Today’s inane image of the day:

These are the texts I need to crack open in preparation for tomorrow’s lectures. Remember that I love books… do expect to see lots of photos of books, lecture notes, etc!

For some reason, I came home absolutely exhausted. Looking back on the past couple of days, I wasn’t too sleep-deprived, but I’ve come to realize over the years that I am absolutely useless without a full night’s rest [how will I survive clerkships?!], so I succumbed to that fact, and took a nap. Sadly, it was a longer-than-intended nap, so it’ll probably mess up the rest of my sleep early wake early schedule [I should be passed out for the night by now!] but I think it was totally worth it seeing that I feel much better.
How I wish I could operate on little sleep!
One of the realities of every educational institution is that not every professor will be effective and loved by the students — while I do not think that OUWB is immune to this phenomenon, I am happy that the overwhelming majority of our lecturers are enthusiastic, prepared and happy to be sharing their knowledge with us. In my experience, when I see these three traits, I end up a lot more invested in the course and end up gaining more.
Today a number of my peers met with one of the course directors to try to work some kinks out in the system. Not to say that I like to take a hands-off approach to these matters, but now that I’m in medical school, I am not as concerned about voicing my opinion when there are 49 other leaders there. One thing I learned from working with other leaders, is that sometimes it is best to back off and let others shine because in the end, we all have our strengths and weaknesses and I personally do not think I do well with suggesting ways to be efficient. I mean… look at me… my break from Epidemiology reading was posting this blog entry [which always takes longer than I anticipate at the time of opening the “New Post” page!].
Oh, and embarrassing fact of the day: I walked into lecture late this morning. I always leave my house with ample time to commute to campus, but today was a slow morning so I left maybe 5ish minutes later and ended up spending 20 minutes in traffic [there was an accident]. Yes, it took me 20 minutes to drive ONE MILE. Bah! If only I could predict when these backups will occur. At least I regurgitated some anatomy notecards in my head…
Okay, the procrastination needs to stop here. Until next time…

Starting off strong & White Coat Ceremony excerpts

Amanda Xi

Today’s inane image of the day:

They weren’t kidding when they said that we’d delve right into work!

The OUWB School of Medicine charter class of 2015 has officially finished its first day of class — how do we feel? Well, I think I speak for the majority when I say that I am tired. We really started off strong with a Pharmacology lecture [that to our dismay did not contain the Powerpoint slides that we had all studied the night before], went right into physiology, did some serious iClicking in microbiology then ended the day with the Capstone course. I should have taken a picture of my binder of lecture notes… it is definitely has a 1″ stack of papers just for today’s lectures [though, they are printed single-sided].
I had my first minor “freakout” last night when I realized that I was not prepared for our first scheduled assessment in Anatomy on Tuesday. After combing through the Moodle site, I also realized that I did not have the required reading text either and that aided to my anxieties as the night progressed. Fortunately, I conversed with a few of my peers and realized that I was not alone. Today, I happily discovered that our assessment had been pushed to a later date [whew] and that we still had to wait for the textbook to come into the bookstore. Crisis averted.
While I was not expecting our first day of classes to run completely swimmingly, it did go [impressively] smoothly. As I had expected, there was a bit of an uproar because we did not receive course-packs [and the administration was not planning on providing them] and the mere 400 pages per year is not nearly enough to get us more than a week’s worth of lecture slides. Thus, everyone spoke out, and it sounds like we’re trying to get the wheels turning on changing this… somehow. I believe that the original thought was that since each of us were provided with a laptop that they would not need to provide paper copies of anything… but let’s be honest here, it’s a lot harder to read/study from a computer [taking notes, drawing arrows, drawing images… all a lot harder to do electronically]. 
Oh and a great classmate of mine figured out a way for us to stay caffeinated… woohoo!
Anyway, Beaumont Health System so graciously shared some excerpts of our White Coat Ceremony from Friday that I thought I’d pass along to all of my viewers. First off, we have a view of all of us while taking those thousand or so pictures:
Can you find me?

I wasn’t kidding when I said we recited the Declaration of Geneva:
Hey front row people! [We were actually arranged in PRISM mentor groups, not alphabetical order]

It’s kind of exciting to relive Friday’s events… I think these video clips will really come in handy when we’re knee deep in lecture material or exhausted from rotations since they’ll remind us of how bright and excited we were to start medical school.
Congratulations again, class of 2015!

How did the work already pile up?

Amanda Xi

Today’s inane image of the day:

This is how I study… I write everything down in some sort of summary-bulleted format and hope that while writing I learned something.
It looks like we have a lot of preparation for our first official day of class tomorrow… remind me why I thought this medical school thing sounded like a good idea?
Just kidding — I know exactly why I chose this path: it’s awesome. Even just relearning these basic cell biology facts is so much more fun because the book incorporates clinical applications as well. Why couldn’t they structure undergraduate classes like this?!
Anyway, back to work!

An Evening of New Beginnings and White Coat Ceremony

Amanda Xi

I apologize for the silence these past couple of days… but I’m back!

The last two days of orientation have been a whirlwind of activity for our class. Namely, we finally saw what “An Evening of New Beginnings” was about and officially declared our dedication to the medical profession through recitation of the Declaration of Geneva at the White Coat Ceremony. I don’t think I’m alone when I say that both events were inspiring and a great way to begin our journey into the profession.

I do not have many more photos from the “Evening of New Beginnings,” but I can say I shared a table with a delightful couple who also graduated from the University of Michigan. In addition to the presence of some very important people and some very important words said by those very important people, the charter class received a gift from Oakland University and the William Beaumont Health System:

Can you guess what’s inside? [Thank you to the person who had to sit there and wrap 50 of these box lids… you did a fabulous job aligning the paper, ribbon and OUWB sticker!]

Ta-da! It’s our very own first stethoscope!

We also had a very tasty dinner!
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Yesterday, one of our first milestones in the medical profession was the White Coat Ceremony:
The ceremony was held on the lawn of the beautifully historic Meadowbrook Hall right on Oakland University’s campus. We listened attentively to more words from Dean Folberg, sage advice and words from the AAMC President, Dr. Darrell Kirch, and about ourselves from Dr. Nuzzarello [unfortunately, around this time the microphone went out around this time] prior to approaching the stage to individually receive our white coats. I know you are all curious to see how awesome they are:
Even an XS is pretty big on me… 

Each of us received an OUWB pin.

Thank you Arnold P. Gold Foundation for this momentous event!

We also received special patches designating us as the Charter Class!

After we received our coats, we recited the Declaration of Geneva as a class:
“Class” then ended, and we took something like a thousand photos of our charter class [it was really bright out… and my face hurt from smiling so much] [I really hope they have a very talented editor… we all agreed that we all needed a bit of airbrush treatment!]. 
Anyway, we have a few assignments already due [actually, we have a reflective writing due tonight…], so I’m off to complete those.