give me my campus back!

Can you believe it’s march already? Wow. We’re already wrapping up the 6th week of the program… so far, I’m enjoying the program immensely. I love the PBL (problem-based learning) style of teaching and find it much easier to understand and grasp concepts this way. My PBL group is made up of 5 guys and 5 gals. Fortunately for us, we don’t seem to have a slacker in our group. Everyone is pretty hard working and each pull their own weight. Hmm… let’s see, it’s also a pretty good mix. There are 2 girls from Brunei studying here on scholarships from their local government; there is a former radiographer, a former nurse, one finished his masters in… in something. I can’t remember. 3 are recent grads from the Brisbane area and then of course you have the 2 canadians.

The other day we had a really great lecture. It was actually more of a symposium. This woman came in to share with us her experiences (& her initial reaction) of raising her son who has downs syndrome. Every now and then we have an amazing lecture like this buried among dozens of seemingly useless lectures. It was quite amazing. The lecture hall of 400 students went dead silent and you could easily hear a pin drop – the lecture hall is actually carpeted but you know what I mean!

Speaking of which… yes, the UQ Med 2010 cohort is a size of 400. FOUR HUNDRED. It is the single biggest class that has ever enrolled into a medical school in Australia. I would be very surprised is there was a bigger class anywhere else in the world. When I tell people this, the first response I get is shock. Next comes the question about the quality of teaching. I’m sure that from an administrative perspective it’s probably a HUGE nightmare. However, (so far anyway) I don’t feel that I’m missing out on anything because the class size is too big. The only times that we are together as a group of 400 is during lectures. In my opinion, it really doesn’t matter how big the size of a lecture is. once you get past about 50 students, you lose that closeness anyway. So to me a lecture of 150 or 200 students really isn’t that different from 400. Secondly, all of our most important stuff is done in our small PBL groups of 10. As a matter of fact, for our clinical coaching sessions (perhaps the most interesting/useful/important – this is where we’re matched up with a GP that takes us around the wards of the hospital. We learn how to interview patients, conduct physical examinations and really learn to apply our textbook knowledge to the ‘real world’) our PBL group is divided yet again to groups of 5. And this way, we get way more attention than we could possibly want/need.

Campus has just been a zoo this week. The undergrads started their semester as of Monday morning. The student population jumped from like 5,000 to about 35,000. There are line-ups everywhere. And it’s not just restricted to the campus… I went to go do some grocery shopping at the local supermarket and these undergrads had basically ransacked everything. There was only expensive brown bread with all sorts of fiber and what-not left, the brocolli was swept clean, there were no 3L jugs of 2% milk (I had to settle for the 2L jug – when I run out of milk this week, I’m not going to be such a happy camper and I’m going to blame it on these undergrads), and the mushrooms that were left were either tiny or squished… I’m going to have to figure out when coles (the name of the supermarket) gets their weekly shipments… I need to get there before all these 17 year olds do!

Anatomy labs are getting better. My head still goes blank when i see a whole cadaver but when looking at different sections of the body individually (like just the liver or just the heart) I can slowly feel my brain starting to work again. I’m getting better. I even held the liver during the last anatomy lab. It was a lot heavier than expected! Did you know that the liver accounts for roughly 2.5% of your body weight?

for those of you in north america, buried in snow: stay warm!
for the rest of yous, stay cool!