OOOh!

I almost forgot.

At the conference, I talked briefly with the guy who's the head of AG world missions, and he mentioned that there is a program where they (and i'm not sure who "they" is at the moment, if it's the AG or not) will pay your loans from medical school if you do stuff for them. I'm not sure if "stuff" consists of doing missions stuff, or becoming a family practice doctor and treating missionary families, or what (hopefully it's option A) but i'm looking into that, and I think it's got the potential to be an awesome opportunity. :-D

I'm waiting to hear back from someone who may or may not be in the country at the moment. :-P

haha.

Well!

Last weekend I went to Springfield, MO for a conference for the Assemblies of God. They had a bunch of student leaders from their 20 (?) colleges, and 14 Chi Alpha students from 11 different campuses.

It was pretty amazing. They treated us like royalty. Everything was high quality and completely paid for...the only money i spent while I was there was getting food in the airport.

and it was great to meet a bunch of people, and we had breakout sessions where all the XA students just got to sit and talk about our ministries, what is going on, what sorts of things we do, what God has been doing recently...that was the best part. Really encouraging. :)

Missouri and New York, I am convinced, are not in the same country. It was shocking to me how open and happy and friendly people were, how they would stop on a busy road to let people walk across a crosswalk, how they talked about God and Jesus anf forgiveness and made jokes about democrats during a show that was sort of like an off-broadway musical performance, in Branson, which is apparently the "entertainment capitol of the midwest".

but it was a good time, and I'm really glad I went.

Yesterday the girl I was working with showed me this game called "filler" which is quite addicting...and i played if for the 3 hour shift instead of studtying for the MCAT...after having spent the entire first half of the day reading a book. which i finished that evening.

The coolest thing of the day was we went to a research lab where the professor took us on a tour, where he's doing research on heart valves and heart valve replacement and trying to build artificial heart valves out of tissue-based materials...awesome stuff! We also saw chicken embryos that have been removed from the eggs and are growing in incubators in some liquid, and you can see their tiny, tiny little hearts beating. SO amazing!

It was exceedingly interesting, and stuff like that almost makes me want to go into research...but then I think that the very basic level at which he explained his work to us was all I really wanted to know, and I would not enjoy getting into the immense detail that he probably knows about the cells that make up and develop into the cells of a heart valve, the development process, etc.

anyways...school is really annoying me, I don't want to be bothered with work right now. I just want to go home and spend time with people without having to worry about due dates and deadlines. I can't wait for some time in life where there is lots of stuff to do today, but nothing that needs to be planned ahead for and worried about and plotted out for the future. is that day ever going to come? I don't know...

Med School

So, I realized that I haven't mentioned this yet so I will.

I"m looking into the Military's Health Professionals Scholarship Program- where the Army or navy or Air Force pays for your medical school, as well as books, housing, plus a stipend, and in return you do your residency at a military hospital and then work for them for as many years as they paid for you.

It sounds wonderful- the idea of not having to worry about tuition or loans or debt, plus military benefits are wonderful...I just am apprehensive about making a decision to commit to 5 years of service, in 10 years. I don't know what my life is going to be like then, and I don't have enough information about exactly how the paying back time works yet to know for sure if that's what I want to do, or if ther are difference between the branches. So I'm playing phone tag with a Navy recruiter at the moment, hopefully we'll be able to talk soon so I can ask her my list of questions and make some sort of decision. Then hopefully she'll know about the differences between the branches so I don't have to re-go through this whole thing where someone calls me, asks me lots of random questions about myself, such as if I have any unpaid parking tickets, and then gives me another number to call, so i call and they ask me more of the same questions, and says they will send my info along. great. so then i get an email with an attached questionairre, to which i reply, then call the person a couple weeks later, who says he's not the medical person, but here is the medical recruiter. FINALLY! so it's been a bit of a process but hopefully this will be the last step before I actually get to know things. :)

My understanding is that you get all your stuff paid for, then you begin residency at a military hospital. Your residency pays back the years that you were in medical school, and when you finish your residency, you work at a military hospital as an attending, and pay back the years you got paid during your residency. I think. And during med school there is some sort of training you're supposed to do during the summer, but I have no idea what that consists of.

advantages: no $200,000 debt when I graduate

lots of benefits

guaranteed job?

disadvantages:

the U.S. Govt owns you for x amount of years

being deployed? ( i dont even know what the liklihood of this is)

limited specialties?

limited patient base -->limited experience? ( i dont know if this is the case)

limited number of hospitals and therefore locations where I could work

oh yeah, and the fact that i'd be doing thins until i was in my late 30s...i may have a family by then, do i want to make a decision that will affect my family like that now, when i'm 21? it's a big step.

so here are my questions:

what is the pre-residency military training?

what does it consist of? (PT, classroom time, etc?)

which hospitals could i work at?

do they only treat military personell and their families?

do you do student clerkships at your school's hospital?

residency:

chances of getting wanted specialty?

Chances of getting a residency in a military vs a civilian hospital?

what's the call schedule? Or does that depend on the specialty/hospital

is there a residency (specialty) they prefer you do?

What effect does doing a fellowship have on give back time? Does it count as giving back or accruing more time debt?

give back
is there a reserve, or just active duty?

what is the difference, in practice?

What are the major differences between working with the Army, Navy, and Air Force?

so there you have it.

Procrastination: The Bane of My Existence, GPA,...and other things.

Today, I shut myself off from the internet and decided to just get down to it and write the research paper I'm supposed to be writing on hemophilia. I got half of it done in an hour or two...and then I let myself back on, and (as you can see) I haven't gotten anything else done since.

This just goes to show you (me...) that I really can get a lot done when I"m actually trying... the problem is that I usually am not trying.

So to drive this point home, I decided that as soon as I go get my laundry out of the dryer, I'm going to watch a movie. :-P After all, it's Saturday night, I should do something fun.

But anyways...I go through phases of loving and hating this class I'm taking- The Molecular Basis of Human Disease (very genetics-focused...cross-listed between molecular bio and genetics). Sometimes I love it because it's sort of clinically relevant, and I'm like "one day I'll learn this in Med school, and it'll be cool that I have already seen a tiny bit of this stuff", but then I hate it because I don't really feel like memorizing the alphabet soup of the mechanism.

I think I've been reading too many med student blogs lately...I was trying to come up with what my studying system is going to be in med school...only problem is I have no idea how my classes are going to be formatted or how the material is going to be presented, so it's sort of pointless.

And, lately I've been trying to think of a specialty I will like more than surgery, because part of me doesn't want to do it, only because of the massive drain on your life and time that it is. But I picture myself bored with everything else. Maybe it's my subconscious desire to to surgery not allowing me to see clearly though. hmmmm...

I guess I'll have to wait until med school clerkships to find out.

All this waiting, I don't know if I can handle it!

Well. my laundry should be done. Off to finish my paper (read: watch a movie)!

All alone

Well I installed a counting thing to see if anyone ever reads this thing. and the answer is no, as expected. But it's not like I have anything interesting to say, so that's okay.

Eventually I might tell people about this blog...probably when I go to Kenya and can't just talk to anyone whenever I please.

I'm currently trying to think of a better name and subheading and sub-blurb for this blog.

I'm also currently not studying. Again.

I am, however, sitting in a "quiet study room" on campus, in which many people are not being quiet. rude. I have actually resorted to listening to my (dying, in the battery sense) ipod, which I never, ever do while actually trying to be productive. maybe that's why my brain feels so full right now?

I'm also hoping the Yankees win game 6 tonight, so they can win the world series. (ooh, they just scored 2 points!)

More to come, next time I feel like procrastinating.

Master of Procrastination

So just for today (ha...) this blog is becoming my tool for procrastinating.

And now I can't even think what it was I was going to write...It was actually sort of interesting too. :-/

oh well.

I just registered for the MCAT about 2 minutes ago...i'll take it Saturday, January 30th, 2009.

I guess that will be more motivating for me to study, having a definite date in mind.

I found out the other day that they expanded the human anatomy and physiology class her to be open to 250 people, but i found this out AFTER my pre-enrollment period was over. so now i am emailing everyone I think can be helpful to try to get myself into the class. It would be absolutely amazing if I could do that!

The other day I decided to memorize the cranial nerves:

I olfactory

II optical

III oculomotor

IV trochlear

V trigeminal

VI abducens

VII facial

VIII vestibulochoclear

IX glossopharyngeal

X vagus

XI accessory

XII hypoglossal

wahoo. now, to memorize the function, foramen, branches, and innervation of each one...plus a million more!

I guess I really should study now, huh. I wish I had my mom's insane ability to not procrastinate. I would be such a better student/person if I could manage to have the compulsion to do things as soon as possible, instead of putting everything off until I feel like it.

urgh.

Wahoo, I changed the layout. Nothing new to say though...

I went for a fake run today with my roommate...and I refused to keep running after about 3 minutes, so I walked while she ran back and forth. When we got home I curled up in a ball on the floor, and now it hurts to breathe. Awesome.

I'm such a slacker...reading and typing blog entries when I have a prelim on Thurs. oh well.

It's actually funny to go back and read that last post...I had even forgotten what site i started this thing on, it's been so long. But i found it on my second try.

I didn't think it was thaaat long ago that I wrote, but apparently it's been almost 2 years.
So I decided that I did not want to apply early, I want to take a year off and do a medical missions trip for a while between graduation and med school. I'm currently in the process of applying to different organizations for that, and hopefully hopefully hopefully God will decide that it's his perfect plan that I end up going to Kenya. :-D

I'll apply to med school in June, and hopefully leave by December (assuming most of the application process will be done by then) and stay for 6 months, come back in June/July, then head off to med school.

So now I'm a first semester senior (aaah!!) and my course load is pretty light this year, because I finished all my core sciences. I have so much (relatively) free time I don't really know what to dooo with myself. Lately I've been reading the blog (from the beginning, catching up 5 years worth of almost every day writings) of Dr. Alice at cutonthedotteline.wordpress.com she's a Christian med student-->surgical intern-->surgical resident, and I think I've learned a lot from reading her blog about what to expect and what life's going to be like when I get the places she's going. And some random medical facts. :-D

I started studying for the MCAT yesterday...My parents decided since I have so much free time this semester, they were going to but me a review book and lecture me on how I should be studying until I did it. So I promised my mom I'd do a half hour (at least) every night while I'm at school, and once I get home (her words:) "we'll marathon it".
great. can't wait. I plan on taking it at the end of January.

I guess I've never mentioned how much I despise chem and physics. a LOT. Orgo isn't too bad, but I certainly wouldn't consider myself good at it by any stretch of the imagination. Unfortunately, the part I like the most I'll probably end up studying the least, because I'm good at it, and it's fresh in my head because I keep taking classes in it- Bio.

I also was given the MSAR- "Medical school admissions requirements" which, I think, is a bad title for that book...there is a tiny, tiny little chart with which classes each medical school requires and recommends that you have, and then pages of general information about the school, setting, curriculum, accepted/applied information, demographics of the class, average MCAT scores and GPAs, etc. But I looked through it, and read the "curriculum highlights" part of all the schools in the geographical area I decided I'd consider going to.

I decided that I really like the curriculums where you have a year-long class about clinical skills/patient interaction/interviewing/History-taking, and then a few-week long course on general principles of bio followed by a one-at-a-time system-by-system review, with corresponding anatomy lab. The "systems-based" curriculums

the AAMC has a site where you can get a pdf schematic of the curriculum at different schools, so i looked up the ones that sounded good in the book.

I got to the Californias (the schools are listed alphabetically by state) before I decided only to look at schools I'd locationally consider going to, but I the one I looked at that I like the best was Keck something or other in California, there was the least overlap of classes (as in, only one organ system at a time, one ends before the next starts...very few schools i saw seem to do that), but there's no way I'm going to school that far away. The school on the east coast that had the closest thing was SUNY Downstate, in Brooklyn. That would be nice, because it's close to home, and cheaper for me (wahoo for state tuition)...so we'll see how that goes.
But I'm doing what I tend to do all the time, and getting way, way ahead of myself.
So for now I need to focus on the present predicament: the MCAT.

I started studying the physics section last night, and realized that I have lost my ability to determine that 100 is a larger number than 87, so I drew a triangle and labeled the 87m side as the hypotenuse, which of course messed up my calculations. Hopefully I'll be able to stop my regression and actually learn some stuff in the near future. :-P

Maybe I'll update this more often now.
Maybe I won't.
We shall see!