Hey everyone!!! It truly has been a trying week. Because I got nothing accomplished during spring break, and I had to practically kill myself to get back on track.
It seems that just as soon as I get money, it gets sucked away by different things. I just got a $189 check for the 2 weeks of work I did for my department. This was supposed to pay for my cell phone bill and my gas for 3 weeks, but I’ll have to hit my parents up now. Most of my check is gone because I had to pay a $100 deposit for the Kaplan course. We had to pay $100 by March 10, and then the remaining $899 is due on April 22. Even though the Kaplan course is cheaper on my campus, $899 still isn’t easy to just cough up. A good amount of my friends got into different summer programs at Yale, etc, where basically they pay you while you study for your MCAT. To me, it seems like a really good deal, but the chair of my department said that he hasn’t seen or heard of too many success stories from those programs. Have you all heard of any? Free sounds a whole lot better than $999, but its whatever.
I was listening to Alabama NPR this morning as I was driving to school, and they were talking about how President Bush has a plan to diminish America’s dependency on foreign oil. He wants to drill up in Alaska, where there is supposedly a significant amount of oil. I’m not sure how I feel about this. I’m in no way an environmentalist, but I still do have respect for this earth. Something about killing off wildlife in the area is kind of wrong. Honestly, I think that if we had the option of killing off all the polar bears in the area or having gas for our SUVs, Beemers, and Mercedes, we would choose the cars. I had to admit it, but it really seems like that is the reality of the matter. I’m not sure how this will play out, but I personally love driving my German machine, but I don’t think I want drastic amounts of animals to die so I can drive my car. Meh, whatever.
I was searching around the SDN forums today, and I found two sites that basically tell you what medical specialties fit you the best, based upon how you answer certain questions. These are the first 10 specialties that the Buffalo website ( http://www.smbs.buffalo.edu/RESIDENT/CareerCounseling/interior.htm?self-assessment.htm) matched me to:
1. Urology
2. Otolaryngology
3. Plastic Surgery
4. Orthopaedic Surgery
5. Ophthalmology
6. Pediatric Surgery
7. Sports Medicine
8. Gastroenterology
9. Neurological Surgery
10. Cardiology
The only specialty I’ve thought about in this group is Sports Medicine and Orthopaedic Surgery. I don’t know about the others. Here are the first 10 results from the Virginia website ( http://www.med-ed.virginia.edu/specialties/):
1. emergency med
2. pulmonology
3. gastroenterology
4. general surgery
5. radiology
6. obstetrics/gynecology
7. orthopaedic surgery
8. ophthalmology
9. pathology
10. dermatology
I’ve definitely thought about emergency medicine, general surgery, and orthopaedic surgery. I don’t know about the rest. As I answered questions on both sites, I realized something about my personality. First, I’m an instant gratification kind of person, so I need to be in a specialty, where I see the results of my work pretty quickly. So I think that that takes internal medicine out. I also, HATE, meetings; meaning that I really hate sitting and talking forever about what we are going to do. I’d rather just go and do it. And I really hate repetitive jobs, where I’m doing the same thing over and over and over again. So I guess that leads me to a specialty where I’m not focusing on just one part of the body. Maybe General Surgery, Trauma Surgery, Emergency Medicine, Orthopedic Surgery, and possibly Sports Medicine. Who really knows anyway? But it is cool to kind of get an idea of what kind of doctor you might be. Do yours and tell me what your top ten were.
Today, Charlene Cole, from the Emory University Graduate School came to give a presentation to the Oakwood Biomedical Association. It was really really good. She basically gave us a presentation first about the Emory University campus, the facilities, etc. Then she talked about her research, which was actually pretty cool. She was studying two close organisms that were closely related, the meadow vole and the prairie vole. When left with others, the meadow vole would usually find an area in the corner and keep to itself, while the prairie vole will usually pair with another prairie vole, and keep each other company. She described it a little more, but basically there is a part of the brain that is related to addiction. It is usually very active in cocaine addicts and when high levels of dopamine are taken (I think). Well, she found that in the prairie vole, that area of their brain was very highly developed, but in the meadow vole, it wasn’t. And when she injected a solution that blocked activity to addiction related part of the prairie vole’s brains, they began to behave like the meadow vole in terms of keeping to themselves. So this lead her to another possible question. Is social attachment as we know it equal to addiction? Do we stay with the people that we stay with because we are addicted to them (in the scientific sense)? It was a really cool concept that she was working with. Then, after she told us all that, she gave as a disclaimer, and then told us that nothing that she just said mattered. She told us that we need to truly find what we are passionate about. Then follow that passion, whether it be graduate school or not. I don’t want to drag on, but it was really cool.
This is the last thing I’m writing for this post, LOL, I promise. I’ve been on my girlfriend for sometime, to at least think of her top ten medical schools that she would send her AMCAS to. She finally figured it out, and e-mailed it to me. I’ll list my schools first, then hers:
Columbia University College of P&S (MD/MPH) (MD/MBA)
Mount Sinai SOM
Yeshiva University (Albert Einstein)
Georgetown University (MD/MBA)
George Washington University (MD/MPH)
Johns Hopkins University
University of Maryland
Emory University (MD/MPH)
Loma Linda University
Meharry Medical College
Northwestern University (MD/MPH) (MD/MBA)
University of Cincinnati (MD/MBA)
Case Western University (MD/JD) (MD/MBA)
These are the schools she choose:
University of Maryland
Case Western Reserve
Loma Linda
Northwestern
Johns Hopkins
Georgetown
University of Miami
Mt. Sinai
MeHarry
Cincinnati
So the schools we don’t have in common are University of Miami, Columbia, Einstein, and George Washington. I know that I have 13 schools and she has 10. I think that I’ll shave some schools off once I get my scores back. I really don’t want to go to Georgetown or GW because they are too expensive, but they are close to home. And the only NY school I really want to attend it Columbia, because they have a good record for putting out future surgeons. I only put the others, because I have a lot of family in Brooklyn.
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