Christmas

Hello, friends! I hope y’all have been having a wonderful and restful break from classes and stress and everything else like that. Maybe you’ve even had a chance to relax and do nothing, in which case, I say relish that as long as possible. Here’s my update on what I’ve been doing with this break thus far:

1. Material for next semester: I’m taking a class called Metabolic Chemistry & Cellular Regulatory Networks. I am SO EXCITED. I only have one required class left before I complete my chemistry major, so this class is just a superfluous one that interested me, and decided to take the risk of it being hard on my final GPA. I think it’s worth it. Anyway, I’ve taken notes and studied two chapters of my book, and I plan to do a few more in the next week so that I have at least some of the material under my belt by the first day of class.
2. Reading: I’m about halfway through The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. I would highly recommend it for anyone interested in getting into the healthcare field, because it hashes out (and in no delicate terms) the issues experienced in the history of doctor-patient confidentiality, the ability of patients to question treatment recommendations, and ethics of obtaining patient permission. Society has made leaps and bounds since Henrietta’s life came to an end, especially given that she was a black woman dealing with cancer just before the start of America’s Civil Rights Movement. Anyway, it just provides a great perspective on treatment developments and the tissue culture industry and patient relations and it’s GREAT.
3. Apply to DO schools: I sent in an application to Campbell University School of Osteopathic Medicine. It’s the newest med school in my home state, with its entering class of 2013 being the charter class, and it’s got really excellent, brand new facilities. While it is not directly attached to a hospital, it has made huge progress in setting up clinical affiliations with several major hospital systems throughout the state, providing students there with the potential for exciting opportunities in the clinical years. This is the first osteopathic med school to which I’ve applied, so it went through AACOMAS, an entirely separate application system (same idea as AMCAS, but slightly different setup). For whatever reason, osteopathic school application deadlines tend to be much later in the season than allopathic schools (Campbell’s primary app deadline isn’t until March 1), so I am hopeful that I could still hear something from them in the next month or so.
4. Reuniting with old friends: my five dearest friends are people whom I do not go to school with. I met most of them in high school and we’ve all remained in touch over the past four years, despite the six of us being distributed between four colleges, two states, and extremely diverse career and life goals. As such, I’ve taken great advantage of all of us being back at home for this short while, and it’s been wonderful. Many a lunch, dinner, coffee, and beer have been shared over the past couple of weeks.
5. SLEEP: I have slept a lot over break. A whole lot. I’ve convinced myself that it’s because I’m still on a sleep deficit from the past two months, but regardless, it has been so rejuvenating. As premeds, we often feel that we can’t, or shouldn’t, take time to just be still. We have been so conditioned to believe that being still = lazy, and that leads to an exhausting spiral of thinking we could always be doing MORE. Don’t get me wrong, I am all about self-motivation and success and reaching the highest of my potential, but I think the ability to pause and be at ease, even for a minute or two, is grossly underrated.

My school starts back on January 8th, so we’ve still got another week and change to go! Might as well make it count. Happy early New Years, y’all!

Finals Week in Undergrad and Other Life Updates

Undergrad friends, we are done with finals week! It was that big dark cloud that’s been looming on the horizon since August that you got really good at ignoring. But you couldn’t ignore it anymore, because it was suddenly very real and giant and threatening to engulf you. And all that productivity you were going to have during the semester to make this week slightly less hellish was suddenly looking like it fell pretty flat. It never changes. So (if you’re like me) you cranked up the coffee machine, found yourself a comfortable study spot, and GOT TO IT.

Don’t act like you’ve never thought about it.

For that, I give you the biggest “CONGRATULATIONS” that can be conveyed via indirect contact online. It’s a hard week for everyone, and it’s never really fun, but somehow we always survive better than we think we’re going to.

And now, if you’re really like me, you have 2-3 weeks of rest and relaxation ahead of you, and you don’t know what to do with yourself. You’re so used to cramming in every last minute with something new to study or some other detail you feel like you should probably know, and now you’re experiencing a delay in coming down from that whirlwind of non-stop productivity.

In an effort to enjoy this Christmas break, I’m going to outline some things on here which I hope to accomplish in the next few weeks:

1. Catch up on sleep while not wasting the morning. Let me tell y’all, I’ve been such a vocal anti-morning person for 21 of my 22 years, but only this past summer (in studying for the MCAT…dark times, y’all, dark times) did I begin to fully appreciate just how much I could do before noon if I planned ahead. I don’t want to waste all that time while we’re between semesters and I have no other real obligations.
2. Blog more often on here. I would’ve been blogging even more often last semester if I hadn’t had a particularly hard semester + 15 secondary applications to complete + beginning to schedule interviews + having my first interview. So, while the time constraints are low, I plan on spewing my thoughts ALL over this blog!
3. Read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. If you’ve ever worked in a research lab, or studied much about cell biology, chances are you’ve heard of HeLa cells. They’re an immortalized line of cancer cells (i.e., they don’t die in tissue culture) that has been instrumental in many of the biggest medical discoveries of the past century, and they were taken from the cervical tumor of a woman named Henrietta Lacks, without her knowledge, shortly before her death. I’ve been meaning to read this book for a while, and I’m so excited to have the time to do it now!
   

   Stained HeLa cells (from Smithsonian website). Yellow = nucleus, blue = actin filaments, and pink = mitochondria.

4. Find more opportunities to shadow. I may get this 3-week break, but doctors don’t. What better way to spend a little of this free time than by exploring a specialty more in-depth? It can only help my chances of admission to a medical school for next year, so it seems like a logical step. I plan on trying to find shadowing in family medicine and general surgery, as both of these are specialties in which I am interested, but I don’t have extensive experience to back up those interests.
5. Apply to some DO schools. The 15 schools to which I have submitted secondaries so far are all MD schools. I have completed the AACOMAS application (same thing as AMCAS, but just for DO schools), but I haven’t submitted it. The two fields of medicine both offer the same freedoms and potential for specializing and practicing, but the DO also places emphasis on preventative care and treating patients holistically (rather than treating just the symptoms). DO schools in the U.S. are growing much more rapidly, with new ones opening all over the place (including in my state), and I want to ensure that I have done everything in my power to go to medical school next year.
6. Re-watch Scrubs. Because it’s Scrubs. And because Zach Braff and Donald Faison’s guy love is one of the greatest relationships to ever grace the television screen, in my opinion.
   

   “It’s Guy Love”

7. Start looking at material for next semester. Full disclosure: I’m such a biochem nerd. If I’d realized this earlier on in my college career, I totally would’ve majored in it. Anyway, I’m taking my second semester of it in the spring and I CANNOT WAIT.

That’s probably all I can think of. For those of you who also are on break: relax, eat, enjoy friends, and be merry, but don’t forget to make the most of this free time! To all of you med students who are probably still in exam week: keep on keepin’ on, y’all. You’re awesome, and you’re doing such incredible work, and I cannot wait to be one of you (hopefully next year)!

ECU Interview

Y’all, I’m not sure if an interview/med school tour combo is supposed to be a religious experience, but it happened for me yesterday. I realized Brody was a great med school, but I did not remotely anticipate just how much I would love it there. The facilities are incredible (they have a new Heart Institute, which, if you’re a CV geek like me, should give you palpitations just to look at), they have ridiculously great technological advantages (the guy who pioneered open heart surgery with the da Vinci robot works there. Casual.), the medical school has phenomenal learning tools (personal favorite – the sim lab that the emergency medicine department wanted to add), and the people are SO UNREASONABLY NICE TO EVERYONE. (I feel like I’m a paid advertisement for this hospital system right now, but I’m truly not exaggerating). It’s amazing. I felt so welcomed by all of the students who interacted with our interview group. They were incredibly supportive, down to asking who our interviewers for the morning were and commenting when they heard a doctor/professor’s name whom they particularly liked.

This is an image of the entire hospital system + med school + health sciences schools (nursing, dentistry, etc.) in Greenville.

Speaking of which: the interview. This was my first interview, so I had absolutely no idea what to expect. I had spent the day prior coming up with outlines to answers of common questions I assumed they would ask, and it was definitely a good idea that I had done some prep, and my dad (who regularly interviews people at his work) did a mock interview for me. I think quickly on my feet, so I think I was able to effectively convey those outlines in words, and the mock interview definitely helped, but if I could go back and change anything about my interview prep, I would definitely have spent more time talking out the answers to myself in a mirror. I’m sure it would have allowed me to fit a greater density of ideas into the time I spent talking, which would be immensely helpful, given that the interviews were only half an hour long each.

The structure of the day: four of us came in for morning interviews, and four more prospective students came in for afternoon interviews. Our days overlapped for the tour of the school and lunch in the hospital cafeteria. We each had two interviews, which were 30 minutes long each, with a 30 minute break in between. This break helped us to re-group, assess how the first interview went, think about any answers we would change for the second interview, and left enough time to find the office of the next doctor with whom we were to interview.

I really liked this structure, more so than a single longer interview. I am convinced that the more people who look at your file, the less likely you are to be eliminated on the basis that one interviewer didn’t like you as much as another one might’ve, had you been assigned differently. I liked that ECU did it this way.

Moreover, neither of the interviewers had been allowed to look at my file beforehand, so they knew next to nothing about me. They received a sheet when I walked in that had my name, undergrad institution, majors/minor, and overall GPA. That. Was. It. I loved it, because, as the Dean put it, “Often, if an interviewer is allowed to read through a candidate’s file prior to interviewing that candidate, chances are he or she has already made up her mind about that person before they even walk through the door.” However, they have to read our files at some point, because we put so much time and effort and valuable information into that primary and secondary that cannot be ignored. For that, they chose two completely different committee members to review only our written files, without any input from interviewers, bringing the total number of people personally reviewing us (and eventually presenting us to the rest of the admissions committee for consideration) to four. Four is a pretty good number of people. Some schools leave this task to one or two people. I think this helps immensely to give a better overall picture of each applicant, with less of a likelihood of being removed from consideration because maybe one interviewer or file reviewer wasn’t as crazy about one of us as the rest of the reviewers were.

My next interview, which is at my lovely alma mater (UNC), isn’t until February, so I think this was an incredible opportunity for me in learning to navigate the interview trail. Regardless, if Brody were to accept me after the experience I had interviewing and visiting yesterday, I would end up on Cloud Nine and probably never come down. Here’s to hoping!

How I Got to Where I Am

I’ve been writing a lot about the application process, but I realized I haven’t written much at all about who I am and how I got to where I am. Lord knows I’ve had to write about that enough recently, given that I’m just now exiting the phase of secondary applications. So, I figured I’d share a bit more about my life.

I was born to a nurse and a biomedical engineer in the lovely, humid state of Louisiana. I walked in on my mom watching E.R. one time when I was five years old and saw a guy on the screen who was on an operating table and covered in his own blood. I had at least five permutations of recurring nightmares about that man for years afterwards, and I swore adamantly that I could never touch medicine with a ten-foot pole, because there probably is nothing more disgusting to a five-year-old fluffy pink girly girl than the sight of blood (funny how all that worked out).

I moved to Wisconsin at age 10 as a result of my dad’s job. He was relocated multiple times during my childhood, so I got a little taste of all latitudinal regions of the United States. One of my deepest, most poignant, lasting impressions of Wisconsin: it was really, really, really cold. I cannot say I particularly enjoyed the -40 degree wind chills that made walking down the street to the bus stop feel like a form of medieval torture. We can call it a character-building experience for the sake of optimism. While I lived there, though, I had two really cool experiences that started to change stubborn little Five-Year-Old Self’s thoughts on healthcare careers:

(1) I got to visit UW’s genetics lab on a field trip, and that was the first day my inner science nerd was unleashed in its full force. Not that I hadn’t exhibited nerdy tendencies previously; there was the time in 3rd grade I decided I wanted to be an astronomer, so I holed up in my room reading history-of-the-universe books from the library while the other girls my age were playing with Barbies; there was also the time I told my parents I wished there weren’t weekends so that I could go to school every day because WASN’T SCHOOL THE COOLEST?!…thank the Lord I grew out of that one. Anyway, I felt my little brain approaching its critical capacity for images of a gel electrophoresis setup and the structure of a DNA molecule and fingerprints and genetic paternity tests and test tubes full of who-knows-what until I was no longer able to control it, and I exploded in unadulterated, rapturous, nerdy 5th-grader joy.
(2) In the same year, my mom started to develop A-fib that became progressively worse until her heart was almost always dangerously out of rhythm. Not exactly the greatest thing to be walking around with. She went to a cardiac electrophysiologist and had an ablation and all was made well, so that was all resolved nicely. Being fresh off the Genetics-Lab-of-Wonder experience, I was all about asking this man questions about all his swanky tools and all the lines that were coming off on that fancy sheet of paper by my mom’s bed (the main difference between then and now being that, thankfully, I’ve figured out what an EKG is). He was one of the most patient and caring men I’ve ever met, and even though I don’t remember his name, I think his example is still one to which I strive in any sort of service capacity.

So, after two frigid years in the lovely state of Wisconsin, Dad’s job relocated one last time to North Carolina. I was less than devastated to leave behind the arctic tundra. Having achieved a minute degree of maturity since the experiences with Genetics Lab of Wonder and EKG Superman, I did a complete 180 and proudly announced, in 7th grade, that I would be a doctor. A cardiovascular surgeon, specifically. I figured it looked cool on TV, so how hard could it be? (I was a hilarious kid, wasn’t I?) I was also simultaneously going to be a principal ballerina in the New York City Ballet, so I obviously had thought very practically through the logistics of that plan. Three years later, I would realize that I actually suck at ballet and that half of the dream would be crushed forever. So it goes.

Jumping topics slightly, I was a band geek in middle school. Braces, cargo pants, bad concept of hairstyling, too much eyeliner…and a flute case that went everywhere with me. Lord, I was a catch. Long story short, I was a band geek until the band teacher publicly humiliated me in front of the class one day, and I quit on the spot. As a consequence of this mildly diva-ish moment, the only other open class to which I could transfer was choir. I hated choir with a burning passion. I hated singing. I hated vocal music. I wanted to hate every minute of time I wasted in there. Except…I ended up loving it. So much so that I continued to sing and train classically in high school, and I began college a few years later as a vocal performance major (funny how that one worked out, too).

Delving into scientific study, serving people, caring for their bodies and minds and spirits: those are my calling. Medicine is what I will do for other people once I am qualified, and I will love nothing more, but music is what I do for myself. It is a God-given talent and passion of mine, and I simply would not be the same person that I am today without that outlet. I can let my right-brained tendencies fly in unadulterated, artistic weirdness when I sing. It is so freeing. Everyone has their hobby that they love deeply and keep alive because of that love, and singing is mine. There is a level of interpersonal communication that can be reached through music and not through any sort of verbal interaction, and having found that, it is easy to channel into my verbal interactions. My ability to be transparent with people is, in large part, augmented by my ability to communicate through performance, and I intend for that to translate into my interactions with patients one day in the future.