Classes...

Oh classes... what can I say? They are fast paced. Really fast paced. Before arriving I'd heard the first  class (officially titled Molecules and Cells) described as a biology degree crammed into 6 weeks and they weren't kidding.

The material isn't impossible, but there is just so much of it. Also, the sheer number of acronyms used is maddening. Our first test is a week from tomorrow and while I am not terrified of it I am very aware that I will definitely have to stay on top of the course materials between now and then. I do not want to be a crammer.

Having children makes studying harder both because of the amount of supervision/interaction they require and because of the time required to keep them fed/clean/healthy. Also not having my husband/coparent living with me doesn't help at all. But my father (thank goodness for him!) is now officially moved in (as are the kids) so hopefully I can neglect them this coming weekend without them actually being neglected.

Sorry for the tangent... back to classes. Molecules and cells is team taught and it is taught in a way that when viewed from a distance makes sense (nucleic acid -->genes --> proteins --> protein folding etc); however, when in class and taking in the information seems like a randomly jumbled mix of biochem and cell biology. The fact that you might have four different lecturers over four different classes in the same day exacerbates the condition. There is no real continuity between individual lecture sessions and it makes it harder to follow the overall narrative. The overarching structure of the class did not become obvious until I started studying this weekend (ie: by being able to look at the classes as a whole as opposed to studying the information from a single class or day's worth of classes).

But other than that, I don't really have any complaints. Of course I might after that first test, ha! I'm learning a lot, and it is staggering how many Nobel prize winners just one of our lecturers has worked with. I really wish I knew how much I needed to study the tiny details. We will have 2-3 questions per lecture hour and some of those hours have covered very complex biological concepts in intimidating detail.

Tomorrow is our first team-based learning (TLB) session and it starts off with our first graded activity of the term. I understand the concepts discussed in the sample questions and I've studied the lectures and notes of the material so hopefully I will do okay tomorrow. :)

Being Social (I will blog about classes this weekend)

I had most of my classmates over for dinner tonight (one girl is training for the Wisconsin Ironman in a month) and it was really fun. I fed them Filipino food and cheese, they brought wine and beer. We talked about classes a little bit, movies, moving, and-of course-the medical students.

I suppose it will be different after we start having labs and start to mingle with the med students more, but for right now we're mostly sitting in class as a block of PA students in class. Everyone is friendly but it sets up an us vs them sort of mentality. Mostly it is the gunners! The folks who ask questions in class not to clarify a point of information but rather to show off their intellectual curiosity or how much they already know. It is hard not to make fun of someone doing that! Generally, you can figure if someone makes it into Duke medical school they had a 4.0 and an MCAT in the mid-30s. Showing off once you've gotten to this point just makes you look insecure.

It was good to get together outside of classes though, especially since right now the other students are the only people I really know in the area! Having classmates I like makes moving to a new place a lot easier :) And they make extremely gracious dinner guests. People pitched in to get all the food laid out and offered to help clean up. Everyone was really willing to try new foods too, which made it more fun. Even the guy who didn't like cheese tried a lot of the cheeses we had.

I want to give my name tag a High-5!

I made it through the first day of lecture (173 slides total). Nothing seemed too bad; although, it probably would have been good to have had human genetics before today... I'm really good with DNA replication because the process is pretty similar in microorganisms, but it is the whole exons/introns thing I didn't get much exposure to. But even with the material not being something that scares me, it is mentally draining to take in that much information in a single day.

I managed to find the PA student room... but it took me having to go up the conference room we used on Friday and then going back down to the second floor rather than just starting on the second floor like a normal person. Once I find a stairwell I feel like I know where I am going. The second years are fabulous and decorated for us! One of them even molded little organs for everyone's cubby. I got lungs (3 lobes on the right one, 2 lobes on the left one) and a very cool name tag.

The first year medical students have been really friendly! There are around a hundred of them and I have to imagine it was strange for eight random people to show up in their class all of a sudden. But several people came by to introduce themselves and we've been invited to join the notes group and get access to the help disc.

Tomorrow we have a clinical correlation lecture where they bring in special guests to discuss specific topics (tomorrow is Sickle Cell Anemia). That means we are required to wear white coats (ha! In addition to taking the med student's classes, we also get to impersonate them) and dress professionally. It is definitely interesting to be learning along side the MS1 and to get the benefit of the education the medical school provides.

Day One Done

After four months of counting down we finally had our first day :-) Yesterday I received a massive binder containing the pathologists assistant program manual and my schedule for the coming weeks and a folder with my lab and team based learning group assignments. These are important things.

And I finally got to meet all of my other classmates! Everyone seems nice and we have a good dynamic so far. Part of the day involved our second years giving us a tour of the parts of the hospital complex that we will be inhabiting and picking out our work areas on the PA student room. The PA student room and the medical amphitheater are the most important places to be able to find so far.

We also received our laptops, sadly even though the med students were issued Macs we were given Lenovo Thinkpads. I was bummed, especially since we pay the same technology fee but I guess I can't complain since it is a laptop. I will be using the external hard drive we were issued a lot though since I had a Thinkpad during my undergraduate years and spent a lot more time in the on campus repair place than would be considered remotely reasonable.

Last night the department hosted a party where our class got together with the current second years, the PAs who will be teaching us, and various faculty. It was a lot of fun and I already adore some of my second years!

Anyway, I have more of the manual to finish reading before class on Monday, so I will finish up for today and report back on Monday after we have our first day of actual class!

Orientation is tomorrow!

Seriously, Hogwarts...

This week has been spent trying to switch from a 2nd shift sleep schedule to a 1st shift one, all in the hopes that I will be awake and functional and on campus tomorrow at 8:30 for orientation!

Right? The bit on the left is castle-y

I had to go to campus earlier this week for my T spot TB test (negative, so I don't have to get another chest x-ray!) which gave me a chance to find the parking garage we'll be using tomorrow. Getting lost would be bad! I also snapped a few pictures of the back side of the hospital/one of the academic buildings. I thought it was really interesting that you could be walking down a hallway and the building around you morphed from modern hospital to comfortable academia. Also, I don't know if any of the readers of this blog have ever been to Duke but parts of it seriously look like Hogwarts (it has both Gothic and Georgian architecture on campus) which then connects to a very large hospital with a massive construction project going on to include more surgical suites and a new area for the pathology department. Right now they get about 50,000 specimens a year (including some very cool complex ones like hemi-pelvectomies) but after the additional surgical suites are added that number will be well over 70,000 specimens a year.

To the right you can see the addition that will eventually house the new pathology department