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