On my super awesome class

The very first exam of my medical school career is tomorrow. And once again, instead of studying, I am blogging. It seems that the best way to make sure I update my blog is to make sure that I have studying from which to divert myself.

What prompted this particular diversion was a quick glance at my calendar, which is very colourful and cluttered full of different things. What stuck out today was my 911 dispatch observation shift, which is why I plan to tell you about my super awesome class.

Yes, my super awesome class. We have electives at school, and one of my electives is emergency medicine. We have suture labs, go on paramedic ride-alongs, observe 911 dispatch centres, and of course shadow and try to do the basic vital sign check-ups on people who come into the ER.

So now that I'm in med school...

I'm busy and important. Well, just the former, not the latter. In fact, I am pretty much a nobody, the bottom of the totem pole, the little minnow (are minnows smaller? or guppies?). But yes, busy. And here I am, writing a blog entry while I sit with Bora and Carolyn, "studying" in the library. Basically, I have very little time to do anything. And this is not Berkeley, nor is it Sydney, where I can run errands on my feet, and know that no matter where I have to go, it's a matter of a few minutes. Here, no matter where I go, it is to be a project. I have to drive, and even if things are "close," they are not really that close.

That doesn't bother me too much, because I guess my whole class is in the same boat as I am. It's very nice to be here, though, to be surrounded by people who are in all the same classes, doing all the same kinds of studying as you are. Not that it wasn't great to be exposed to all sorts of other stuff at Berkeley and in Sydney, but it's just different. For example, when I was looking at the elective courses that were being offered--everything just looked so interesting and intriguing, not like in undergrad where you had to take some of everything and there were just classes that you knew you wouldn't be able to stand. I guess this means I'm in the right place, if not intelligence-wise, at least interest-wise.

My apartment is nice and new, everything is very white (including all my furniture, which is how I want it to be) and very IKEA (shoutout here to my favourite Swede, Mickis!). Only my room feels like home, the rest of my apartment feels somewhat foreign, but I presume I'll get used to it soon. Meanwhile, I'm starting to eat much healthier than I used to, which is weird but not really. I still buy all the junk food that I like to eat, but for the most part it sits in an unopened pantry, probably because I'm running around all the time and am barely at home enough to just sit and snack. I forsee days where I sit at home and just gorge myself on these foods. Potentially dangerous.

But, onto med school itself. It's really different here, as I assumed it would be, from undergrad. My class has just 125? 126? people, and I can pretty honestly say that I haven't been in a class that small since...elementary school? Even our middle school classes were bigger than this, no? Not to mention high school classes, or just the MCB class at Cal.

So that in itself is quite odd. The other thing is that the class structure is also kind of like elementary school. Weird to compare it in this way, but it's true. Very rarely since the end of elementary school have I sat in the same classroom for more than three hours at a time. Well, here we do. We get different professors to come in and lecture (and they are amazing, but I'll get to that later), but we sit in our chairs and hang out in the same lecture hall for most of the day until lunch time, and then some days we come back and sit for more lectures, or we have electives or labs or something of the sort.

Plus, they super-coddle you. Not in a bad way, of course, but the staff here is so involved in making sure that everything is okay and you're all right that it's actually a little unnerving. I'm just really not used to it, after the impersonal-ness that is Berkeley. Of course, I love Berkeley and I feel it wasn't a bad thing for me then, but this is kind of awesome. Everything is there for me if I need it, and if I don't, well, it's there anyway.

And the professors and deans are amazing. They really love what they're doing and you can tell. Plus, they really know their stuff. Lectures are just...different. There's also a difference in lecture style. Of course, we're still learning all the basics of biochemistry and molecular bio and stuff, but there's a different focus, I think. In undergrad we were pounded with the facts, what is and what isn't, the details of everything. The facts and details are important here, too, but we're also presented with a slightly different focus - on what goes wrong in a disease state versus a normal functional state. It kind of puts things in perspective.

Anyways, just chillin' in the library. Should probably get back to the books, seeing as our first test, just 2 short weeks into the quarter is coming up (gosh, quarters are just so much shorter than semesters).