This has been an awfully cold and wet weekend, but fortunately Santa provided me with an NBA season starting this afternoon. Throw in a bunch of hours spent playing Counter-Strike Source, browsing Android-related forums, submitting code snippets… and its been yet another uneventful break. In all honesty, I’d much rather take a rain check on […]

After taking clinical shelf exams in Internal Medicine, Psychiatry, OB/GYN, and Surgery, I’ve arrived at a conclusion which may be shared by others who, like me, aren’t gifted test takers – multiple choice exams cannot accurately assess a student’s clinical knowledge.

Yesterday evening… after admittedly pulling an all-nighter to cram for the departmental exam… I finished my neurology rotation. Between Thanksgiving Break, no weekend responsibilities, and the rotation being only a month long, I only spent sixteen days at my clinical site. While that amounts to relatively little exposure compared to other rotations, the lecture series […]

With the NBA season finally commencing on Christmas Day, today was fantasy basketball draft day for the ten person Baylor Med c/o 2013 league. Here’s my lineup:

After table rounds this morning, one of the residents asked me if I wanted to do a bedside lumbar puncture (LP). I instantly jumped at this opportunity and proceeded to gather the patient’s consent, LP kit, and other supplies necessary for the procedure. In the meantime, I tried to recall the nuances of what we […]

Our pediatric grand rounds topic last week was MELAS syndrome, a mitochondrial genetic disorder characterized by neurological and muscular symptoms like ataxia and fatigue, respectively. MELAS is an acronym for: mitochondrial encephalomyopathy, lactic acidosis, stroke-like symptoms. As with typical mitochondrial inheritance patterns, MELAS is passed maternally (from mother to children), although rare cases of new mitochondrial […]

Neurology has gone by so quickly! Our hours are great, we don’t work on weekends, and a lot of each day is spent traveling to and from lectures/conferences at the main campus. After morning rounds (which can sometimes take a few hours), my colleagues and I scatter to follow up on pending tasks with our […]

The clerkship director for neurology, a very well known professor in the neuroscience blocks of the basic sciences, shared an interesting pearl of wisdom during last Monday’s orientation lectures – “memories are created, not recorded.” He remarked on the fact that when people were asked where exactly they were during the September 11th World Trade […]

It’s the rotation that I was waiting for since January… the three months which would show me whether or not the career I wanted to pursue coming into medical school was really my best fit. In retrospect, I think it is.

PageRank (PR) is a semi-secret algorithm which serves as the foundation for Google’s search engine. To put it crudely, the higher a website’s PR, the more “meaningful” websites reference it via links. While other factors are taken into consideration (ie, the age of the domain and search engine optimizations), link reputation is the dominating component […]