First Week of Medical School

Several things have been made painfully obvious to me in my first week of medical school. First of all, it’s true – med students probably cover just as much in one week as undergrad science students do in a month. Second, I feel like I’m in the backseat helplessly watching my brilliant classmates excel. Being off for a year has made me far more rusty than I’d like to admit, so I better change in the coming days before I get too far behind. 😉 Third, working with a cadaver is ridiculously amazing, but I feel like my inability to remember anything from gross anatomy isn’t doing my donor any justice. 🙁

Okay, enough about the sad/boring stuff. Baylor Med is awesome! It’s fun getting to school, reading the lecture topic for the day, thinking that “oh, I’ve studied a little of this before”, and then concluding the lecture with “I don’t remember EVER learning this before.” I have some of the most well-rounded classmates in the country, and we’re constantly pushing each other to learn everything we possibly can about the human body. The professors are awesome (and have a great sense of humor), the facilities are fantastic (except I’ll never understand why the gross anatomy lab is carpeted), and the curriculum is solid! 🙂

Aside from the Core Concepts course which all students have to take, I’m taking two electives: Medicine and Management and Physician Communication Skills. The former is a course designed to teach students about medicine on a state/national level as well as other topics like insurance. Physician Communication Skills is a one day course which deals with an extremely important skill for aspiring physicians to master early on – communication. I’ll be on class from 8 AM to 5 PM on Saturday, August 22nd, but I’ll get a full elective credit for the day. 🙂 Furthermore, students are required to take Patient, Physician, and Society (PPS) which entails a group of roughly ten students meeting together to discuss topics like taking histories and examinations. We also have Integrated Problem Solving (IPS) starting next week, but I’ll write about that once I have my first session.

Histology at Baylor is based off a digital slide box (saves you the trouble of having to bust out a microscope and slide tray). This week, histology dealt mainly with identifying different facets of the skin.

Other than that, I’m looking forward to what the coming week will bring and the White Coat Ceremony on Friday.