First of all, welcome to my blog! I figure this is an easy way to share some of my med school experiences, keep you all up to date with what I’m doing, and spend a bit of time reflecting on my time here. While 4 years sounds like a long time right now, I’m sure it will fly by and I will later enjoy having a chronicle of my experiences. I don’t know exactly what form this will take, but I’m sure some entries will be directly related to medicine, some will be tangentially related, and some will just be random.
I had intended to start this before orientation, but the last three weeks have managed to escape me. To catch you all up, here’s a (not so) brief summary of my time so far in Toledo, Ohio:
Saturday, Aug. 16th I arrived in Detroit (about 50 minutes away from Toledo) after a red-eye flight. I met my roommate Elizabeth, who graduated from UCLA and grew up in Southern California. In retrospect, it probably would have been smart for each of us to live with someone from a bit closer to Ohio as we both showed up without much more than clothes and a small handful of other things to contribute to our apartment. As a result, we dedicated the whole first weekend to craigslist and garage sales and the effort was totally worth it, as by the time orientation rolled around we were set up with two couches, a dining room table and chairs, a coffee table, two end tables, a bed for each of us, and furniture for each of our bedrooms. Needless to say, we were very lucky to have Elizabeth’s parents’ pickup truck and an apartment only 7 steps up from the front door. I was especially lucky because my friend Andy and his brother left a whole bunch of stuff at their dad’s house in Toledo when they moved to Berkeley this summer, so I got to do some apartment “shopping” there as well. Our apartment is now fully set up and I really like it! It was completely renovated over the summer, which meant new cabinets, appliances, carpet, and paint. It has a few idiosyncrasies (such as carpet in the kitchen and an 8 foot sliding glass door that goes from my bedroom into the living room… we’ve since covered that with curtains!), but we enjoy it. It is a short 10 minute drive from school and the majority of my friends live and hang out within a 15 minute radius.
Monday, Aug. 18th we started our orientation! The days were a bit long (Monday – Thursday from 9 am – 5 pm each day), but it was nice to have time to settle in, meet people, and prepare for the start of classes. I would have had a lot more to say about orientation if I were writing this during that week, but at this point it seems like a bit of a blur and has been eclipsed by the events that followed it. Orientation week culminated in our “White Coat Ceremony” which was a 2 ½ hour long ceremony that mostly consisted of the tedious presentation of 53 (I counted!) different scholarships and awards to mostly 2nd, 3rd, and 4th year med students. However, the last 15 minutes was very exciting as we were each called up from our seats on stage and given our white coats that (almost) make us look like real doctors! The other notable (albeit sobering) event from the end of orientation was the distribution of our notes packet for our first unit. It was 490 pages long and we were all a bit overwhelmed by this, and then totally shocked to see the dates that these notes would be covered: Aug. 25th – Sept. 5th. Yes, just two weeks.
Monday, Aug. 25th we started our classes! Our schedule is pretty consistent week-to-week and classes generally run 8-10, 10-noon, and 1-3. Each 2 hour block we have a different topic and a different professor. At some point I’ll go into more detail on the way our academic blocks are set up. Right now I don’t want to think much more about it.
Monday, Sept. 8th we took our first test! I’ve never spent so much time studying (I realized that in the weekend before I spent almost three times as many hours studying as I did sleeping…) but the sheer volume of material makes it so that you don’t have another option. Everyone basically commits to spending a good chunk of the afternoon and evening each day reviewing the material that was covered in that day’s lectures and then reviewing the whole week for a second time over the weekend. I’m already discovering ways to make my studying more efficient for me and learning what each professor expects from us. The relief of finishing that first exam yesterday, turning it in, and knowing I didn’t fail was huge! However, it was slightly tempered by the fact that before we left, they handed us our new note packet for lectures that started back up today. It seems that this is indicative of life as a med student, and eventually life as a doctor. The work doesn’t seem to stop, but rather just seems to steadily gather momentum through the years of med school. I think many of us may have had this idealized vision of med school being the “hard part” of it all, but of course then you move on to residency where you need to have an exponential learning curve with 80+ hour work weeks and even in practice you need to stay on top of all of the basics in addition to new developments in the field to be able to best serve your patients. It’s a good thing that there’s no doubt in my mind (despite all of this) that this is what I want to do with my life.
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