Winter Semester Underway

Now that we are a week into our winter semester, I can give a little bit of info on all the classes that we are taking.

The big momma of them all is Clinical Medicine. This is when we learn how to diagnose and treat patients (in H+P last semester, all we learned was how to ask all the right questions and do the physical exam). Now that we have our findings, what do we do with them? We've started with derm, which isn't that bad, just a lot of skin conditions to learn. We also had our first pulmonary lecture today...all 4 hours of it, and it was packed!

We're still taking pharm, and it's still the same...except now we're responsible for dosages. I thought I had enough on my plate trying to remember the names and classes of drugs, and the various treatments for certain conditions (I had NO idea treating pneumonia is that complicated!), but now we're supposed to remember dosages. Yikes. At least we do pharm in blocks that somewhat correlate with what we are doing in Clin Med, so it's not like we're learning about drugs to treat urinary tract infections when we are studying asthma in clin med.

Another class we are taking is Med Law and Ethics, and while it's so, so important and somewhat interesting, I'm secretly glad on the inside that it's only pass-fail. And it's only once a week.

We're taking Evidenced Based Medicine as the followup to our Research Methods class. Because I'm in a Master's program, I have to do a Master's project or thesis, and this class sets up the basics which we are doing next year. I haven't the foggiest idea what I want to do my project on, so I have some thinking to do.

The last class we are taking is Pathology. To quote the introduction from my professor: "I'm not going to tell you how to treat people, how to do great things for people. I'm going to tell you about everything that can kill you. Just because you're young, you're in good shape, it doesn't mean you're not going to die. Soon." Word on the street (from the med students) is that he's a great professor, and he certainly has a good background in forensics behind him. It should be an interesting class!


Sooo.....I kinda forgot that the last two weeks of last semester, we weren't in class that much and therefore didn't have much outside reading to do. When this week came around I foolishly decided I didn't have to spend my entire evening studying, and now I'm already behind. Whoops. I can't believe how much we have learned this week. This weekend I am going to be doing major major catch up, considering I am traveling home to Maine for Thanksgiving and that is going to eat up 25+ hours of study time, and can't afford to be this far behind.

In other news, my roommate and I finally found another apartment. We're moving throughout the month of December. It will make my commute to school around 20 mins in the morning, but it is in such a great location. There is even a coffee shop within two blocks that I studied at the other night to test out, and it was great! I don't do coffee but they made me some steamed apple cider. 


I have a great picture to post...in about a week and a half. Stay tuned.