Day 110: TBL feedback, round 23 min read

Amanda Xi

Today’s inane image of the day:
Starbucks wins again with this combo: “Let’s rediscover why we’re best friends” AND my favorite holiday tea: Joy. Mmm, you can bet I’ve been stopping by to pick up a cup of this yummy blend that’s only available during the holiday season.

[This entry was re-published on 5-15-12 to correct for formatting.]


I feel like a lot of medical student blogs are free advertising for Starbucks… maybe the company should help subsidize our education…


[As you can tell, I just couldn’t stay away from writing and all of you, so here I am.]


Today we received the second round of feedback from our TBL-group members. Last time, I didn’t take my reviews so well — this, I attribute to a number of factors out of my control [hormones, Mike, etc], but also to the fact that I do tend to read into things way too much [this is a problem when it comes to taking tests…]. Additionally, since these comments are all personalized, it’s impossible not [practicing my double negatives since our TBL was full of them today] to take them to heart [isn’t that the point of constructive feedback?].


This time… I knew what I was going to get before I opened the envelope.


The last stretch of TBLs have really been a struggle for me — I’m not necessarily doing anything different [actually, I’ve been preparing for them earlier], but for some reason the concepts haven’t been clicking as easily as during the BFCP1 TBLs [I didn’t do extremely well on those either, but I was doing better]. I suspect that since I was semi-familiar with many of the concepts initially tested, that I got away with less studying… but this block is completely new information to me and to say I’ve been floundering is quite an understatement. Furthermore, my greatest weakness is rote memorization. Even though as an engineer, I used to say that memorizing stuff is easy… it’s one thing to memorize little facts about a concept you are familiar with and a completely different story to memorize new terms and concepts. Oh, and the sheer volume of stuff to memorize in medical school is a challenge in itself [I’ll post my binder of lecture notes after the BFCP2 Final].


All of this being said, I realize that I definitely didn’t contribute much to my group during this stretch. Moreover, I have always had a difficult time with learning things in an auditory-manner, so it leads to not being able to fully incorporate a team member’s contribution during deliberation. In conclusion, I need to work on the following:

  1. Learning new concepts AND memorizing things
  2. Active listening
  3. Not looking into questions too deeply
I find it extremely appropriate that this list is coming near the end of the year… can you say, New Year Resolutions?

Anyway, the saddest part of coming to the end of the semester is the fact that our TBL groups will be changed for the start of our first Systems course [Neuro… scary, eh?]. I absolutely love my team members and it’ll be really painful to have to part with them. 

Enough talk! Back to the books…

Today’s medical school fact of the day: First generation antihistamines [e.g. Benadryl] are lipophilic and thus able to cross the blood-brain barrier (and affect the CNS) more readily than second generation antihistamines [e.g. Claritin]. –Pharmacology lecture notes



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