my friend sarah. & my new friend priscilla. sort of.

a big fat congratulations to my friend sarah. she is engaged! :D

while checking out sarah's engagement announcement video on YouTube, i came across this girl named priscilla ahn today. she is awesome. i might even go as far as to say that i might have a teeny tiny crush on her.
i know i'm not exactly a connoisseur of indie music but priscilla! where've you been all this time? ;)

i love the harmonica/guitar combo. this one is called "i don't think so".
here's another couple if you feel like procrastinating. wallflower & dream.

first day at work went well.
as mentioned it was a netball & rugby tournament at a private school. it was good. pretty low-key. no major injuries so that made my job a lot easier.

sitting at 16 hours of study for the week.
i've got a long night ahead of me if i'm going to hit 20.

immature?

caught the movie "forgetting sarah marshall" tonight.
it was pretty funny. i enjoyed it. it was what you'd expect from judd apatow & the 'knocked up' / '40-year-old virgin' crew.

i was just thinking... i wonder if my years of enjoying silly raunchy comedies - romantic comedies for guys - are slowly coming to an end. i mean SHOULD they be coming to an end? would it be so bad to enjoy movies like this when i'm 25? (nah, not at all). how about 30? (hm... nope. still good). but 40? (???).

who am i kidding?
i'm still young. 40 is light years away. sure. call me young and immature!
if you're planning on seeing this movie, its hilarious. but be forewarned. there is some full frontal nudity. male nudity.
>.<

new gig...

i've got a job!
i've got a job!
i've got a job hey hey hey HEY!

i had spent a couple of weeks in february, sort of half-heartedly looking for a part-time job. it was a half-hearted attempt because i wasn't too keen on working (who wants to work when you don't have to right?!?!) & also, i didn't think there'd be part-time work that could fit all my 'conditions':
- i wanted something that wasn't permanent, where i could take months off at a time (like june and november) to study for exams.
- i wanted something on weekends so as not to conflict with any school.
- i didn't want anything more than about 6 hours/week.
- and i wanted something that was going to pay me at least $20/hour.
- i didn't want to spend a whole lot of time traveling to and from work.
- and most importantly, i wanted something medicine related. i didn't want to usher, i didn't want to sell clothes, and i definitely didn't want to cook french fries.
i know. i'm picky.

i had a couple interviews back in february though.
one was with the Spinal Association of Australia as a personal carer. i thought the interview went well & they really liked me. they seemed to like everything except for my availability. they were looking for more hours and possibly for someone to spend nights at the house. that wasn't going to work for me.

i also had an interview with a company called Emergency First Aid Services. basically they provide medics for events. pretty much everything about this job was looking pretty sweet. i could pick and choose my shifts depending on my availability and the venue. pay was decent. it was medicine related.
unfortunately the training/orientation was held during the week that i was up camping on fraser island. oh well. i figured it wasn't meant to be.

BUT!
the other day they called asking if i was still interested in the position. they were looking to hold another training session to fill in some holes that they had. alright!
so saturday is my first gig. it's a high school netball tournament. i'll let you know how it goes.

ps. do you guys know what netball is? netball is the australian version of basketball - they still have basketball here but i'd say netball is bigger. the concept is the same - you're still trying to get a ball through a hoop. however, there is no backboard and you're not allowed to dribble. once you have the ball in your hands you must stop. you can only advance by passing or shooting. you also have allocated zones. you can't run everywhere and anywhere. the offense is on one side of the court and the defense is on the other. it's also more popular amongst women than men.

good stuff.

ok... so maybe i came down a little harsh on my UQ education last week. let me balance that out by giving credit where credit is due.

path tutors - blake and angela.
2nd year is a lot of pathology. in a nutshell, first year looked at how we function normally. this year is all about what can go wrong. each week we get a 90 minute tutorial to supplement our PBL cases and lectures.
each week is a different pathology tutor. i've been lucky to have blake or angela for a few tutorials now. they're great at explaining the material and keeping things interesting. in particular, they're great cause they don't make you feel like a major idiot. you see, the tutorial involves describing slides or pots (specimens of diseased organs/tissue), and most of the time we have no idea what we're looking at. just a bunch of dead tissue suspended in formaldehyde (is that what that liquid is?).

when you describe something incorrectly you're usually met with something along the lines of "yea, i can see where you're coming from. but..." or "hm... it's really quite difficult to tell isn't it?"

on top of all this, angela's got quite a thick british accent, so things like "thrombosis" come out as "from-bosis".
she is also incredibly crude. she's dropped the F-bomb on a few occasions now.
with angela, when you describe a slide or a specimen you're met usually with either a...
1. "shit yea!" if you're right. or
2. "fair play. fair play. i guess you COULD see that, but..." if you're wrong. haha. FAIR PLAY?!?! who says that? ahahaha!

clinical coaches - aida and dr.ong.
clinical coaching is where we get to poke and prode patients in the hospitals. arguably, it's the best hour and a half of each week.
our coach for the first 8 weeks was a GP by the name of aida. she was fantastic. what makes a clinical coach so great? hm... first and foremost has to be their knowledge. it does you no good when the coach can't explain something. aida knows her stuff.

last week we got a new coach - we switch clinical coaches after every quarter. dr. ong is his name. he came off a little... strong, maybe even a little belligerent. a bit of a kook. but he's pretty good. he's hilarious cause he's edgy and pushy. he has thick coke-bottle glasses and talks with his eyes closed.
>.<
seriously. that's what he looks like! he only opens them once every few minutes to make sure that we're still there.
despite all his kookiness, we had our first real coaching session with him today and he was really good.

PBL tutor - mal.
our current PBL tutor (also changes every quarter) is a GP/professor by the name of mal parker. he also happens to be our prof for ethics and professional practice. in case you didn't notice, no one really like ethics - recall ethics, schmethics! as a matter of fact this is how mal himself once described ethics: if med school is like climbing a mountain, then ethics is the rock in your shoe.
yea. whatever that means. i'm not sure why you can't just take off your shoe and throw the rock out! ;p

anyways, what i'm getting at is that poor mal gets a bad rap from the ethics. he's actually a great PBL tutor. he's also a GP so he's got plenty of clinical insight that he shares with us. best part is that he's not JUST a GP. for instance, today someone had brought up this article about how "anaesthetists, obstetricians and gynaecologists are more likely to euthanase terminally ill patients with less than three months to live compared with other specialists". we were just casually discussing it when he says "oh! that's my study". and what do you know. it sure is.

***

continuing on the topic of alternative learning resources from the last post, check what i found (well, a friend found and brought to my attention) on YouTube. this guy washingtondeceit has put up a bunch of histology lectures. how amazing is that?!?! and you thought YouTube was just a big waste of time. ;p

kiwi skins and pirated audio lectures.

i used to have a friend in undergrad that would eat apple cores. he'd sit in class and eat his apple. when he was done with the pulp, he'd chomp his way through the whole core - seeds and all. i thought that was pretty weird.

but now i have a friend that eats kiwis like they're apples - without peeling them. she'll grab them by the 2 ends and bite right into them. *blah* all that hairy fuzz on your tongue. every time i see her eat a kiwi, i subconsciously stick out my tongue & scrape the surface with my front teeth. and of course, i make fun of her.
;p

been listening to these mp3 files of this guy by the name of Goljan.
from what i know, Dr. Goljan is a pathology professor at oklahoma state university. he's also published several books and audio CDs on pathology - in particular pathology prep for the USMLEs. he's pretty good. he explains stuff better than 99% of my lecturers here at UQ.
it's a little sad that i'm paying all this money to UQ but get my learning from pirated mp3 files. oh well. you gotta learn, when you gotta learn. doesn't really matter how right?

speaking of which, lectures are utterly useless lately. you might have 1 good lecture out of 10 in a week. i've continued going to lectures cause:
1. it breaks up my day nicely - otherwise on mondays and thursdays, i'd never even leave the house.
and 2. i don't want to miss that ONE good lecture.
BUT at this point, i am seriously re-considering things.

speaking of USMLEs. i'm leaning towards not writing them at the end of this year. will re-evaluate this decision after mid-year exams.

was good about studying this week but need to do more. i'm going to start keeping a rough tally of the number of hours of study i do each week. last week (sunday to saturday), aside from lectures, tutorials, clinical coaching sessions, PBL group meetings, year 1 & year 3 tutorial groups... i spent about 17 hours of study.
goal for this week: 20+.

chalk one up for the little guy.

there was some confusion as to whether or not our tuition would be going up this year.
in one offer letter we were told that fees would remain fixed for the duration of our program. in another offer letter, we were told to expect a 3-5% increase annually.

yesterday we got a letter confirming that our tuition will NOT increase over the next 3 years. whew!
(we were all sort of expecting this but it's nice to have it in writing).

what sucks for the current first years is that they got a 13% hike in tuition compared to what we paid last year. THIRTEEN PERCENT!!! to make things worse, they are not under a fixed contract so they could potentially have tuition increases every year for the next 3 years at 3-5%.

what does this all mean in actual dollars? well, it means that being a 2010 grad instead of a 2011 grad could potentially save me as much as $32,545.25.

wow.

~8 weeks...

... until mid-year exams.
i'm not in PANIC mode (yet).
but i'm definitely in the NEED-TO-GET-MY-BUTT-IN-GEAR mode.

to continue with the car analogy.  let's say i was a 6-speed porshe 911-turbo... mmm... turbo... *drool*

currently in: 2nd gear.  
out of 1st gear and doing more than just the bare minimum.  slowly building the momentum. but plenty of gears still to work with.

USMLEs???

to write or not to write. that is the question. 
i've been thinking for the last couple of weeks whether or not i should write the USMLE Step 1 at the end of this year.
i can't seem to make up my mind so i've come up with a list of reasons why i should/should not write them.

why i SHOULD:

• it keeps my options open, I don't want to close the door of going to the States for my internship/residency.
• it would suck if I didn't match with a Canadian residency program & had to wait and reapply the year after that.
• Step 1 primarily consists of material that I will have covered in the first 2 years medical school - that means the material is going to be fresh in my head NOW.  not after i graduate.
• more knowledge is always good.  You can't argue with that.
• if i want to specialize in something, it'll be easier to do so in the States than in Canada.
• there is potential that our cohort is going to be screwed.  there are more and more Canadians that are studying medicine outside of Canada each year.  no one really knows what the matching process is going to be like come 2011.

why i SHOULDN'T:

• the idea of studying in the US even if it's just for a few years does not seem very appetizing.  i'd much rather spend a few years up in Sudbury, Timmins, heck even Thunder Bay! than go down to the states.  or would i?
• lack of time/memory space.  there is plenty of work to do as it is.  Do I really want more?  sure i can better manage my time but what about the brain space?  how do i get more of that???
• i haven't decided what kind of doctor i want to be, but GP is still very high up on my list.  things might change but from my current understanding, it is not and won't be impossible to match into a GP program.
• worse case scenario might be that I don't match & need to take a year off to reapply.  i could study for my USMLEs at that point.  in the big picture, would that be so bad?
• perhaps the biggest question of all - and no one really knows the answer to this one.  if you do, then you are a god in my eyes - is will I NEED it???  i don't want to study and sweat for something that I'm not going to use.  it's not like buying an extra loaf of bread because you're not sure how much bread you're going to consume over the week.  that's easy.  just buy an extra loaf, you could freeze it before it goes bad.  worse case scenario, it grows some mold, you throw it out and your down $2.49.  big whoop.  

some help please???

turn that tv off!

you burn more calories sleeping than you do watching television.
i can't seem to find some literature to back this up but our EBM (evidence based medicine) prof told us, so it MUST be true!
ok, i'm going to bed.

hope everyone had a great april fools' day. we got up to some shenanigans at our house. here's a little snippet of what went down...
1. susan and i hid an alarm clock in matt's room set to go off at 4am. for those of you that don't know matt, he is NOT a morning person.
2. laura and i have bedroom doors that face each other. so when i left in the morning, i took a piece of string and tied the door knobs to each other. keke. i left her just enough room to squeeze a pair of scissors out.
3. matt and jenn (a friend of susan's who is currently staying with us) saran wrapped laura's car. THAT was pretty good.
4. someone actually caught spiders and put them in the peanut butter jar. they were meant for me. fortunately, i didn't crave any peanut butter that morning.
5. someone switched the salt and the sugar. that's too classic.