Yes, it has been a year since I last posted anything but that could be due to the feeling that I am speaking in an empty auditorium with the lights off. This is a viscous circle - no updates = no readers = no updates and so on..... So, I will try to update more often this year.
I survived my first year of medical school relatively unscathed, meaning that I never had to remediate a topic or even a test despite the fact that I could have been more efficient at studying. That's probably the most important thing I learned in the first year was how to study the massive volume of material being thrown at us. I had never really had to study before and definitely never had to memorize so much information. In physics and math you don't memorize so much data. The trick there is to do the practice problems and be able to do similar ones on the exam. In medical school you can't really practice any problems, you memorize memorize memorize. One exam I added up the total number of lecture slides we had to cover and it was over 1,000! These aren't the usual prompt the lecture minimalist type of slides either, they are text heavy things that are packed with details about diseases, drugs, procedures and microbes.
On top of the work required for school, I decided to form a Grappling club on campus. This hasn't really required too much effort, just setting up practices and helping to instruct the members. Oh, and we had to petition the student government to pay for some new mats. That was a hassle and I'll blog on that at another time. Luckily, another student helps out with instruction but I've been the one to do everything else.
The real time suck has been my volunteering to be the student government VP of Finance. Not only am I keeping the books, writing the checks and keeping an eye on expenditures, I have to write the regulations, setup the files and clean up the bookkeeping from past neglect.
I guess I don't need more to do but I will try to keep this blog updated. Mostly for myself I guess as it may be fun to look through the posts in the years to come and see the condensed version of this journey and what I had to say about it.
