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!