Week Two? What?

Apparently this is the 2nd week. ONLY THE 2nd WEEK?? Craziness.

we have an exam Monday on 2 full weeks' worth of stuff. That's incredible that only 2 weeks gives you enough stuff to have 2 practicals and 2 written exams.

Anatomy:
We're starting in the thorax. We have dissected the muscles of the chest, opened it up and removed the heart and lungs, and looked at a boatload of nerves, vessels, membranes, etc. inside the thorax. It's pretty awesome. My cadaver is, we're pretty convinced, the best one. He was pretty old and incredibly skinny when he died, which has made the dissection much simpler than the other groups who have a lot more fat to remove and get in the way everywhere.  He had lung cancer, probably from smoking, judging by the blackness of his lungs. People really should NOT SMOKE. It gets really, really nasty inside your chest, and your lungs will start sticking to the walls of your chest and that is not what you want.
Anyway.

TAing histo lab was one of the most fun things I've done this week (and that's saying a LOT seeing how much I LOVE dissecting!) - I'm in a room of 24 students with a professor who knows a lot but doesn't talk much, so I pretty did whatever I wanted. A group of students had to present a powerpoint slide summarizing the lab, that they were given, and then everyone just has to go through the slides the lab manual tells them and find the structures they're supposed to find. I spent the whole time running around the room bouncing from person to person answering "BIG" questions that I remember having last year, that seem like nothing to me now. It was a lot of fun being able to teach people stuff I loved learning myself.

We put up black contact paper on a wall in our apartment, so now we have a giant chalkboard, basically, in our living room and we've been drawing stuff all over it to study. It's pretty much the 2nd most awesome thing ever to grace a wall. The first being this other painting I have that I absolutely love.

Also, I HATE embryology. I cannot wrap my brain around it. It doesn't make any sense to me. I CANNOT visualize what's going on...the process of this growing out of there, migrating up here and turning into the heart 8 months later...not sticking to my brain. ugh.

First Day of Medical School!!!

Wahoo!
Today was my first official real day of medical school!
The day that I've been waiting for basically my entire life.
I keep thinking how it compares to the olympics. I'm closely following the gymnastics and the girls keep talking about how they've been working their whole lives for this one moment and they have to go do their thing now that they've prepared for so many years for it. It's sort of like that except that this is not the end, this is not the glory part...but I have been thinking about/imagining/anticipating/working for this day my whole life. Instead of every 4 years, this is going to take a full 4 years. And at the end I will be awarded "doctor" but that still doesn't mean squat (in the medical field. Lay people will be impressed but to everyone else, I'll be the most clueless person around for another while)

We've been having orientation since Sunday, so I've met a bunch of people in my class, started being friends with some of them, hoping not to see too much of others...:-P (kidding. sort of.)

I have 3 new roommates and they are great and we are all getting along great and nobody is really weird or really dirty or anything like that. so it should be good. :-p
But I still miss Nitasha! It's WEIRD being here without her!

The feeling of "Oh no everything is new and I'm alone" that i had in college and last year here is not present this year...since many things are the same, and a couple people from my program last year are here as well. So it's been a much nicer transition than others I've had.

TODAY I MET MY CADAVER. The man who donated his body to the medical school so that I could learn anatomy, so that I can be a doctor, so that I could practice medicine, so that I could save people's lives. It was not as unsettling as I was afraid it might be to see the body for the first time. The face, hands, and feet are wrapped up partly to keep them from drying out, and partly to keep the situation a little more removed from the reality of the facts - next week we're going to open up a human body and take a look inside. Therefore, it's easy for the brain to just file it away as fake, I guess. I'm sure as time goes on it will sink in a bit more.  We didn't do any cutting today, just sort of got an intro to the lab, and then headed downstairs for lecture.

We got an intro to histology, which I'm (YEY!!!) TA-ing this year, and then an intro to anatomy, and then 2 anatomy lectures. The first one was mostly stuff that wasn't new to me...definitions of anterior/posterior, medial/lateral, and all that jazz, and then we started on the thorax - vertebrae, the names of all the different parts of the vertebrae, ribs, how the ribs are attached to the vertebrae and then the sternum, the muscles of the rib cage, the blood vessels and nerves supplying the rib cage...it was fun! I love that I have to learn this stuff now!

And then I came home and decided that since it's Friday I was going to veg out a little bit so one of my roommates and I watched White Collar. Because it's an awesome show.  I'm sure this won't last long.

Meta-learning

Disclaimer: rambling philosophical never-getting-to-the-point lies ahead. Not my fault if you're confused at the end...this is how it goes in my head and it's not my responsibility on my blog to reorganize my thoughts so they make sense to you. Who do you think you are?? I'm the only one who reads this anyway. 

Ahem hem.

Learning about learning. Metalearning. We had a lecture about learning and memory last week...so I'm sitting there trying to cram information into my brain. Information about how the brain crams information into itself. 

Pretty awesome to think about. 

What happens is that information is stored as connections. Each neuron is receiving something like 30,000 inputs form other neurons, and putting out similar amounts. (or maybe more...or less...depending on the location it really could range from 1 up to anything. Not the point.) If you see something, information goes to the visual part of your brain. When you're remembering what you saw, you're activating the same connections that were used to see it the first time. The more often you think about seeing it, the stronger those connections get. The connections for the things you saw once and never thought about again slowly get weaker and go away. Use it or lose it. 

So the more you think about stuff, the easier it gets to think about that stuff. 

The less you think about something, the harder it gets to think about it in the future. 

Problem is you tend to strengthen connections at the expense of other connections.  The information is stored in the RELATIVE strengths of connections. 

So that saying "one thing drives out another" really is true....which kind of is not a good thing for medical school, whose goal is to put a MASSIVE amount of information into your brain and get you to be able to recall ALL of it with high accuracy and speed. But they taught us, in medical school ironically, that it's really hard to do that. 

DOES ANYONE ELSE SEE THE PROBLEM HERE??? 

I've kind of known this for a while, because everyone knows the more you keep reviewing something the less likely you are to forget it. A million times I've learned stuff that I knew I'd need in the future, but after a while forgotten it, and then thought "I should have kept reviewing it!" but there is SO MUCH information that by the time I review everything I have to remember once, it's been too long and I've lost the memories from the beginning of the review. 

Buuuut, you can add more connections so you can have more connections that are strong (and more that are weak...but the point is more that are strong)

I feel like my life is the same way. The more time I spend doing anything the more I want to do it. The more I sleep the more I want to sleep, the more I'm on facebook, the more I want to facebook. The more I'm home the more I want to be home. The more I study, the more I - wait, nope. The more I study the less I want to study. ;-)

Buuuuuuuuuut you can't add more time to the day the way you can make more neuron connections. We're constantly reshuffling our time within the day, within the week, within the month, or year. Everything you do is at the expense of something else. I don't like that! 

I've realized that this is basically a rant against time. I just became sick of thinking about this so I will conclude. 

Conclusion: I can't wait until I get to Heaven and there is no time constraint and probably no forgetting and never having to choose where to invest your time, because you can do everything. 

ACCEPTED!

Wahoo!! Got into medical school FINALLY FINALLY FINALLY THANK YOU JESUS!!

I was home for the weekend because, well I'm always home for the weekend, but my auntand cousins were in from Ohio and we had a surprise shower for one of them, and so I ha just gotten back from my long happy family weekend when I got an email. It was aaaaawesome! The only black mark on this whole thing is that I wish I could have told my Grandpa, in person, before he died. It was 2 months to the day after he died, and he wanted it so badly for me. I think he knows, but I wish I'd have been able to tell him myself and hear him laugh the way I know he would have when I told him.

So yeah.
I've accepted the acceptance and I am so excited and looking forward to FINALLY achieving one of my lifelong dreams - taking gross anatomy! (What a nerd!) And I'm excited about TA-ing histology, because I LOVED histo and I love the idea of teaching it...and a million other things. :)

I'm also moving forward with the Air Force, so I'm praying that there are still some scholarship spots left for this year, even though it's late, so I can get that going. It will be nice to have them paying me, I could use money. :-p

I'm supposed to be studying for my first Neuroscience exam of this block but find myself seriously lacking motivation. It's on Monday, and normally when there are so few days left I'm in super focused study mode but NOT SO this time. I don't think it has much to do with the med school acceptance because I felt this way at the beginning of the block...and it's not because I don't like it, because I didn't feel this way during biochem and I hated biochem. I don't really dislike it...but a lot of it i'm just like "meh"

We've done some development of the brain/spinal cord, brain/spinal cord anatomy and nuclei and tracts, olfaction, some visual pathways, the thalamus, ventricles and CSF, sensory perception, reflexes, propropception, and cerebral circulation.

That's a lot of stuff. I guess I have to just suck it up. but REGARDLESS I'm going to MED SCHOOL!

In which I become a bed bug chew toy, and make a much-awaited-but-not-like-you-thought announcement

First things first: Actually…that will come at the end. Fun things first:
When the girls decided to do my laundry for me, they also decided to make my bed for me. So they took the sheets off so they could put them back on really nice, I guess, since they were on loosely because I have twin size sheets on a single size bed. It has never bothered me. Then again I don’t iron them before I put them on the bed either, as they do. But apparently during this process a bug was found. And when it was squished it had blood in it. Yes, there were bedbugs. BUT. There were two mattresses. The top one had been on the bed, the bottom one I added from a room of spare mattresses, apparently I picked a bad one because this one is the cause of the 3-ish new bites I’ve ended up with each morning. I always thought it was just mosquitoes because it’s always been on exposed areas like my arms and feet, which are sticking out of the sheets. So once again they laughed at me and we got rid of the bad mattress and replaced it with one that had been sunned enough to make bugs go away the other day. If only that was the end of the story. That night, I went to sleep on the couch about an hour into trying to fall asleep because I was SO itchy. Part of it was my head, I’m sure...but I also had some new bites in the morning. So all the mattresses from that room were taken out, and everyone in there went into a different bed in a different room, with a different mattress. Problem solved, right? No. the next morning I woke up with more bites. That night I couldn’t fall asleep because of the itching, oh yeah, and I found 2 bed bugs crawling around..one not on the bed, one under my sheets. So I went to sleep on the couch, and resolved to boil my sheets and pillow and pajamas to kill any possible bugs that may have been left. So I did. Also, the rooms and beds and basically the whole house were sprayed with pesticides. That night, I found another bug crawling around. And interrupted one in the middle of biting my arm. While I was still AWAKE. So…I went to sleep on the couch again. This morning we took the mattress and the bed out of the room and put them and my sheets in the sun, and sprayed this room again. Hopefully all this, along with my fervent prayers, will prevent any further bites. It’s not typical bed bug bite though…it’s just a lot of them on my feet and hands, with a few on my arms and calves, and one on my side. They supposedly typically bite in clusters on the torso, but mine are all single, random ones on the extremities. I’d doubt it was bed bugs if I hadn’t seen and killed several of them that look exactly like they’re supposed to.

On a lighter note, I went to my first Kenyan wedding on Saturday. It started at 10:30, so naturally we started our 1.5 hour trip at 11:00. Somehow we managed to miss very little of the ceremony. When we arrived the groom’s mom was in the middle of a very, very long speech (doubled in length by the translation from Swahili to English). Followed by an extremely detailed account of the groom’s life’s important moments, the bride’s life’s important moments, and the important moments in their relationship, including the exact date which they got their government-mandated-before-you-get-married HIV test. Then there was a quite good and quite funny sermon from the pastor, as well as a “I’m only going to talk for 1 minute because we’re running out of time” “greeting” by his wife, which turned into another very long yet also very good and very funny sermon. FINALLY we got to the vows, which would have been very traditional what-you’d-expect-at-an-American-wedding except that the pastor, being funny like he is, was ad libbing and adding a lot of stuff in…making them say “I love you, you know I love you, I love you” 5 or 6 times in the middle, etc. Also, the putting-on of the rings isn’t a “just slip it on their finger” like we do, they veeeery slowly work it down the finger so there’s lots of time for pictures and video. James started singing this song as he was doing it “you are important to me, I need you to survive”, it was quite adorable. So theeeeen they signed the license, had communion, and were announced to the crowd. Hooray! THEN literally every pastor in attendance (there were several) was asked to stand up and greet everyone, some elderly women that James often treats were brought up to say how wonderful of a person he is, etc etc etc. It was just hysterical to me how everyone who began speaking mentioned being quick because we were in a rush to be out of there on time, but they forgot about that as soon as they got into what they were saying. SO it was QUITE a long ceremony, but eventually we made it to the reception, a group of tents on the grounds of a school in Nairobi. There was a special tent for the pastors to sit at, where they were served food instead of standing on the line and bringing it back to their chairs like the rest of the guests. Lucky for me I was travelling with a pastor so I got to it in the special people section…though I got up to get my own plate anyways, because I had a special request to NOT eat my weight in rice/potatoes/beans. :-D

There are many other fun, funny, interesting things from this week but it’s getting LATE and I need to get to this, so the rest of the fun stuff will come soon.

Ready!? You’re not going to like this news.

I mean, really, really not gonna like it.

Unless you’re sadistic, or you know God’s inner thoughts, that is.

I’m serious. It’s bad.

Do you know what it is yet?

You probably do.

Yes, that.

The unimaginable.

It’s happened.

(Drumroll)


I didn’t get into Buffalo either.

Initial reaction? “I knew it, I’ve been dreading it all day, for some reason”. In the afternoon, I just felt this strong compulsion to pray for my one last application. I fought the urge to pray for an acceptance in favor of praying for God’s will to happen, whatever it was, and to give me the strength to be OK with it. SO when I got a cell phone call from my mom, I knew what it was gonna say, since she doesn’t call unless it’s important. There’s an online application status check that she’d been religiously checking, and it said “non-accepted”. You know…I still haven’t gotten an email from them saying so though.

Anyway. So I was, obviously, and still am, quite, quite, QUITE disappointed…This is something I’ve been looking forward to and EXPECTING for a long time. Not just because I hate the idea of rejection/failure/TELLING EVERYONE I’VE EVER MET ABOUT SAID REJECTION/FAILURE(!!!!!) but because I was really EXCITED about going! I miss the college atmosphere, I miss my life having a weekly schedule, I even miss STUDYING and TAKING NOTES, and I was so excited to get to learn all that stuff I’ve been wanting to learn for forever! And then to have that just drop out of possibility for another year…I’ve never in my ENTIRE life spent a moment where I didn’t know what the next step was. I always had a perfect plan of what I was going to do for the next year, next 4 years, next 12 years…and there I was left with NO CLUE what to do until I could re-apply, since of COURSE I’m going to re-apply.

So for a couple days I’ve been becoming OK with the idea, and asking God to show me what on earth else I’m supposed to do with my time. I’ve considered several different things, and then today I spoke with Buffalo’s admissions director to ask for advice on what I should do to improve my application. He said my extracurriculars and being in Africa and patient experience are great, but my grades could use a boost (Seriously…I TOLD you people I didn’t do as well as I wanted to in college and I could tell by some people’s faces they thought I was playing it down. But I was serious. Physics, Orgo, chem…..they were not kind to my GPA. Unfortunately Bio classes weren’t the only sciences I had to take or I would have been golden). So he had this suggestion that I have spent the literally last 7 hours researching and thinking it’s a brilliant idea- a masters!
Because if I do a more advanced degree, in science, and do well (and if I get a masters in a bio-related (aka not physics) science, that will make my grades much happier, to go with my apparently “impressive” MCAT score. And you will NEVER know what any of those numbers actually are, so guess all you want, you can stick bamboo shoots under my fingernails if you want, I’ll just tell you a lie. :-P
Anyway, so I spent the whole 7 hours, like I said, looking into programs and I didn’t even know they existed before today but it turns out there are many one-year programs (some masters, some post-bacc) that are made for people about-to-go-to-med-school who want to strengthen their application or just get a masters first, or other ones for people who decided to be premed at the last minute and need to get the prerequisites in. Mom and I have talked to several people on the phone today, who seem to be impressed with my grades-as-told-by-Jayne (let’s hope she had the numbers right :-P) and think I’ll for sure get into those programs.
So if THIS works out, I will get to take some pretty AWESOME sounding classes, including a few that are the same classes the first year med students are taking at that same institution, some biochem (love), cell bio(wahoo!), histology (almost better than ice cream) and the love of my life, anatomy (as in, with a real-live (I mean, dead) cadaver.
And then when I get to med school I’ll be smarter than everyone else cuz I went to Africa AND took a bunch of extra graduate-level biology courses. :-P
They start at the end of August and miraculously have application deadlines in May or June or even July. Probably because they attract the “I’m-a-failure-at-life-and-didn’t-get-in-to-med-school” crowd. :-P

So that is the current state of things. It sort of is really, really terrible, because the goal of my entire life up to this point has been GET IN TO MEDICAL SCHOOL…and then I didn’t do that. But I’m making the best of it I guess, finding the silver lining and what not, trying not to think about what I don’t want to think about, etc etc.

So here’s what you can ALL do for me, as a favor.
If there is even an ounce of feeling sorry for me in your whole brain, throw it away. Or at least don’t let me see it. :-P I hate feeling pitied more than anything in the world almost, so DON’T DO IT. Just accept it and move on with life, like ME!

Also, I joke about what a huge disappointment I am to myself and the world at large, etc etc, but I’m really okay. I had spent a lot of time bracing myself for this moment, and learning how to be OK with it and trust that God STILL knows what he’s doing whether I get it or not. Every step of the way something new happens and I, silly little human, ASSUME I know where he’s going from there (AKA, “there must be a reason He wants me in Buffalo!”) , and there’s another bend in the road I didn’t see coming. Anyway.

Sorry that was so long…in case you hadn’t noticed these blog posts are entirely just a stream of consciousness, with little-to-no proofreading and far-too-many dashes. I don’t know if I repeat myself or jump around or what, but you’re getting a very uncharacteristic look into my brain. Feel privileged.

Well the bugs have been eating me out of sleep the past few nights, and it’s past midnight and I’m waking up at 7, so I’m going to bed now. Good night, sleep tight, and PRAY FOR ME that the bedbugs don’t bite!

Aaaalmost there!

We Interrupt this broadcast to give you the following Public Service Announcement:

If you are still getting emails from the facebook group and you HATE them, do this:

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-click "Edit settings" in the upper-right-hand corner

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-click "save settings"

-under any post I wrote, click "subscribe"

And then you will get notifications when I post something there, but not when the other people you may or may not know, do.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming:

My brain isn't fully processing this idea that I'm leaving in 31/2 weeks! I feel like I'm ready to go...but also that I have SO much to do.

I don't think it's going to start seeming real to me until I start packing.

I still have to...

-figure out what I need to bring/not bring (hooray for having a friend who's been doing this for -about 6 months already for packing advice!)

-actually pack it

-see what shots I need...and get them

-get my travel visa...lucky for me, one of the missionaries I'm working with has a friend in the Kenyan Embassy in Washington, DC. Unucky for me, they decided to change the cost of visas starting Jan 1. Somehow, that translates into, visas that continue past Jan 1st are now more expensive...and instead of processing your visa we will mail you the stuff back, and tell you to send it to us again on January 1st. That's cutting it just a liiiiiiittle close!

faaantastic.

I still haven't heard ANYTHING from ANY medical schools...but, as always, I have no control over this situation so I have no choice but to learn patience and trust God.

Which brings me to this:

A quote from Oswald Chambers' My Utmost for His Highest (I highly recommend reading his daily devotional at myutmost.org!!)

I read this the other day:

"Our Lord is dethroned more emphatically by Christian workers than by the world. God is made a machine for blessing men, and Jesus Christ is made a Worker among workers.
The idea is not that we do work for God, but that we are so loyal to Him that He can do His work through us - "I reckon on you for extreme service, with no complaining on your part and no explanation on Mine." God wants to use us as He used His own Son"

and I found it quite interesting. I think a lot of times we (or at least I) trust God with something partly because it might be his will, but a bigger part simply because it's the situation I think should happen, and doesn't God want me to experience the situations I want to experience?? (haha...)

Now....of course there are times when what I want and what God wants are the same (I think), like with this medical school thing. I truly believe that this is what God wants for my life, and I really want it too. So I trust that God's going to work it out so I get into medical school. But why do I trust that? Is it because that's the plan I picked for my life and God's being nice and giving me what I want? Or is it because I'm trusting that it's His will, and He's going to make it happen because it's His will? I think it should be more of the latter than it is in my head.

So what if I also want to go to medical school for completely "selfish" reasons. If I really felt God was calling me to do something I didn't really want to do would I be praying for His will to be done as much as I do now? I can say from experience, not really. And that, Oswald Chambers says, is how we make God into our blessing machine, instead of making ourselves into His workers.

So of course there's a balance to this...we shouldn't stop praying for the things we want in life...but when you have a realization you've got to take it to an extreme at first so that you can settle back into moderation and learn from it, so that's what I am doing. :-D

Random interjection- I think I'm going to name my first son Oswald, and call him Ozzywaldo as an embarrassing childhood nickname. It's still better than Yelliepoopalasaloo or however you spell that. (Thanks MommaJayne)

On another side note, I still have not finished putting away all my stuff that I brought home with me, and tonight Dad said I had to finish by tomorrow night so that my sister could have space to start packing her suitcase for our cruise. Which means that the cruise is SO close! :) Don't be too jealous though, I've heard Florida's supposed to be in the 60s when we get there. Nicer than NY but not really cruise weather. Oh well, I'll be in 100 degree weather soon enough!

Also, I really, really miss Cornell! It's better now that most of the people who were there have gone to their respective homes, but for a week or so every time something from Cornell popped up on facebook I had this terrible "AAAH I'm MISSING OUT on something!" feeling. Guess I'd better get used to it.

Also, there is a ladybug bouncing around among the light bulbs in the fan in the living room, and it reminds me of that time they infested my bedroom and we vacuumed about 200 of them out of my room in one night. That was a fun day. Especially with the smell they give off when they die. :-p

Alright, enough of me babbling. Good Night!

UNREAL

Well. One week from now I will officially be a college graduate!

I just finished filling out my AMCAS application the other day, but can't submit it until June 1st

The hardest part of the application process was actually deciding which schools to apply to!

It was really tedious/annoying typing in all the basic information, and then going through and inserting EVERY SINGLE college and AP class I've EVER taken...even though they are going to get a copy of my transcript! But it must be done...

My personal statement was a breeze, since I'd already written it last year for the health careers evaluation committee.

Hm...for one second lets pretend that people actually read this blog. If I was a freshman or in high school and I was going to apply to medical school what would I want to know?

1. TAKE AP CHEMISTRY. Biggest regret of college was that I didn't take AP chem in high school. It would have made my freshman year SO much better!!

2.If your college tells you medical schools don't like it when you use AP Bio credit, I'm pretty sure they're lying. I've not seen ANY school that doesn't say it will give you credit for anything your undergrad institution gives you.
With that said, I recommend one semester of college bio, even if you got a 5 on your AP, just to make sure/refresh your memory/learn a few new things/sometimes if you're a nerd like me Bio is just FUN!

3. Take several upper-level bio classes. This is an unwritten requirement anyways, and absolutely required if you AP out of intro bio

4. Little known fact: most med schools require a letter of evaluation from a health careers committee. At Cornell, this meant submitting a personal statement and resume-type form, and having an interview with a faculty member (randomly assigned). The faculty member writes a letter of evaluation (not recommendation...though it is supposed to cast you in a positive light) and then there is a committee of important people who edit the letter for consistency across the letters. They also collect your recommendations from faculty members and put all these letters together in a packet and send them to AMCAS (American Medical College Admissions Service- an online common application) and AMCAS sends them to all the places you tell it to submit your application to.

5. The above process is sort of annoying, but necessary. If your school has a committee and you don't use it, medical schools will think you are weird and not like you.

6. 90% of what I learned my 4 years of college has had nothing to do with academics, other than academics created a stressful environment which sped along all my other life skills-learning that I did. I learned how to study, how to make friends, how to be a friend, how to function as a human being, how to fix problems, how to stop creating (as many) problems, how to realize that you're an idiot and do something about it, how to realize you're an idiot and not do anything about it- then rinse and repeat...the best thing you can do is find a balance of meeting people and spending a LOT of time with them, and doing your work. When you graduate even if your GPA is as pathetic as mine, you will be glad you made the friends you did rather than spend your life in the library. Who remembers sitting in the stacks reading a textbook? I don't know. But I know I'm gonna remember sledding down the slope. That slope is a 70 degree angle. It was fun. And we could see the people in the library studying.

7. So back to medical school related things...

So you log into AMCAS, you type in all the stupid things...name, parents names and jobs and ages and siblings and all their info (Why do medical schools care if I have a brother in high school or not? I mean, I love the kid, but who else cares?)

Then you do that annoying thing where you type in ALL your classes, and click through a bunch of questions...all very easy silliness

Then there is a section where you enter every medical and non-medical thing you have done since freshman year that could POSSIBLY make ANYONE on an admissions committee think you're cool or important or talented or a nice person.

Then you submit your personal statement

Then they ask you to choose schools from a list

Then you scramble for your MSAR book and say to yourself "crap...where am I gonna apply?"

Then you will call your parents to ask them, since they know everything.

The following conversation will ensue:

Father Dearest: "Danielle, you have to apply to at least one school you're almost certain you're going to get into!"

Danielle: "Dad, there isn't any school I'm that sure I'm going to get into. Med school isn't like college like that. There's schools in Alabama that have lower GPA requirements...but I don't want to go to school in Alabama!"

Father Dearest: "What if your future husband is in Alabama?"

Danielle: "I don't want to marry someone from Alabama!!" (No offense to anyone from there...it's just...a very different world in the South and I don't have a particular desire to be a part of it. :-D)

Father Dearest: "What if your husband is someone from New York who didn't get into school anywhere else?"

Danielle: "I don't want to marry someone who didn't get in anywhere else either!!!"

Father Dearest: *laughs at me*

so...that wasn't much help

so I proceeded to list 7 schools....5 in NY, 1 in PA, and 1 in California, just for fun, because THAT would be a sign from God that my husband was at medical school...if the only school I got into was as far away from home as I could possibly be and still be in the continental US.

So now the application is just sitting there in limbo land waiting for June 1st.

Now. I am both super excited and super depressed about the approach of that day

because it means the end of THE most amazing for years of my life. I have decided to return to Cornell to work with Chi Alpha Christian Fellowship as an intern-sort-of-thing in the fall, until December...and I'll go to Kenya in January. So I'm going to get to be back here with no classes, which i'm psyched about.

but I'm gonna miss my Heidi! We've been best friends and roommates since sophomore year, I told her that I didn't know if I could survive at Cornell without her, I've never done it before!

So we'll see how that works out.