Zach's Blog

The last three weeks have been a bit crazy.  Medical school has been pretty involved (who would've thought?!) and apparently society as we know it has begun to implode on itself. As far as medical school goes...in anatomy we went over the head. That's right, the entire head. This includes cranial nerves, the eye, ear, tongue, facial muscles, and glandular tissue. In physiology we went over the respiratory system and histology was mostly a review of previous material while touching upon the eye, ear, and lungs. As far as the current state of the world, there was a presidential election in the US. If this is news to you I'd encourage you to get out a little more. When it comes to topics as volatile and polarizing as politics I like to keep to myself for the most part. Occasionally I'll share something if I feel I can really add to the conversation, but I think most everything that can be said has been said. However, after watching post election social conduct I feel t...

We just finished another set of exams focusing on the cardiovascular system. There was some respiratory and neck anatomy pushed in there too but it looks like that will be the focus of the next three weeks. I don't think I've really explained the format for these exams yet so prepared to be wowed. Every three weeks we have four hours of exams. The class is split into two halves. One half does two hours of a physiology exam while the other half is further split into a histology and anatomy sections. Histology is basically an hour of identifying tissue samples on a computer and answering questions about them. Anatomy is held in the cadaver lab with anatomical structures pinned and questions about their clinical significance. These two groups rotate and then trade off with the physiology group. Physiology is just under two hours covering the last three weeks of material. If you thought it was fun reading about it, just imagine how fun it is to do it. Everyone develops their ow...

She loves the swing. I've realized that medical school isn't just about cramming a semester's worth of information in your head over the course of three weeks. It's also about cramming a semester's worth of information in your head over the course of three weeks and still living a balanced life. I'm pretty sure "balanced" isn't the right word though, because it seems somewhat unattainable given the requirements put upon medical students. I've found that having a family makes this all the more noticeable. Everyone love's sleeping on top of mom Over the last three weeks everyone in my family has taken turns being sick. Addie got hand, foot, and mouth disease which completely messed up her already fragile sleeping habits. Poor little Zoey was also sick and may have caught it but was still pretty adorable. Lexi had a sore throat for several days and one day of a really bad fever. She handles it really well but I came home early anyway...

Monday : Labor Day! Which means that Lexi tried to clean the house with screaming kids while I finished up as many projects as I could before the semester gets insane with the beginning of the human structure and function class. Basically, I won't be seeing anything but the inside of a book until December. Tuesday : We had a disease scenario training in which we figured out that ice cream was responsible for gastroenteritis following a church picnic in the 1940's. I then spent most of the day studying and spent some time at the park with Addie while Zoey and Lexi went to the store. Wednesday : Took the final exam for mastering medical information and then learned about how to take someone's sexual history. It seems like we spent so much time emphasizing how we shouldn't feel awkward about it because it's necessary that it convinced people that they felt awkward about it. Some of the standardized patient interviews were really interesting because it became mo...

Monday : Zoey woke up from a nap with Flock of Seagulls hair We had some super fun lectures on confounding factors in study designs and how we get towards assuming causation. Basically, if you read any article that claims some some sort of finding was proven from research you should only assume that their claim might be right. Never assume any findings are correct. We then spent 1-5 working on patient interviews with standardized patients. Tuesday : We finished our last two purely biostatistic lectures. Some fun talk about linear, poisson, and logistic regression. We then got in our small groups and did some technology and resources stuff. We basically practiced finding resources on various case studies so that when we are inevitably confronted with a case we don't understand we can quickly find more information. I then had a PubMed quiz in which I had to demonstrate that I was able to use PubMed efficiently to find information on stuff. Wednesday : We learned about modi...

Monday : We reviewed different types of study designs and the lecturer confused us all by jumping back and forth between different topics. We finished a PBL session about STDs. One student tried to argue that AIDS isn't that bad. That got some interesting looks from the PBL facilitators. We got grades back for our first homework assignments. I went to a review for the content during lunch and people were surprisingly uppity about the grades they got. I'm not sure why so many people were worried because we were all told that we got passing grades and it's a pass fail course. Maybe they're planning to do really poorly on the final. We finished the day off with 2-3 hours of standardized patients while I tried to stay awake (Addie hasn't been sleeping lately). I then wrote some flash cards for the exam I have Wednesday morning. Tuesday : Two quick lectures on cohort studies and a technology and resources group meeting. The advisory deans have been having one on one ...

Monday : We had a problem based learning (PBL) case that was meant to exercise our public health and disease prevention knowledge. Besides that most of classes were just introduction to various topics and what's expected of us. After all of our classes were over we had the opportunity to sign up for special interest groups that occasionally meet and teach about various specialties and service opportunities during lunch. I signed up for several and got to do an ultrasound on some guys arm. He showed me what his artery looked like on the machine. I thoght it was pretty darn cool. Tuesday : Classes technically ended at 12:00, although I didn't get home until about 4:00.  We learned a little bit about statistics used for screening for diseases in our first lecture. In our second lecture a fourth year medical student taught us about societal determinants of health. As one student put it, "He talked so fast he sounded like Eminem." We then spent the remaining time in sm...

It was registration week and oh what a week it was! We started off the week by doing some exciting orientation. While we did do some fun activities involving paper work and training for N95 masks the majority of activities culminated in me meeting a bunch of new people, learning their names, and immediately forgetting their names because so much was going on. But that only covers Monday. Tuesday involved lots of set up for passwords and iPads (One of the mandatory tools for us to have is an iPad. Unfortunately, we aren't using them to play games.) Besides that most of the day was just listening to people go over resources available to medical students.  We did do an interesting mindfulness activity directed by the counseling center. We each got a box of raisins and spent five minutes using all five senses to "experience" the raisins. When we were invited to comment about our individual experiences throughout this activity I decided to restrain myself and not mention how...

Several times I’ve been asked for advice on preparing for the MCAT from other premed students. There are a lot of resources out there and it’s really hard to filter through what will work best. To make matters more difficult, everyone has different needs when preparing for the MCAT. This means it’s not as clear as getting the best (most expensive) resources. In other words, there is no list somewhere that will tell you exactly what to do. That’s why I think it may be best if I start by giving you a little background on how I learn and what worked best for me and then review the resources I used. Like most premed students, I typically got A’s (with the exception of a B in one of my religion classes). If I didn’t get an A on a test I would review  what I got wrong until I could take a variation on the same material to get an A. In doing so I would identify why I got a question wrong (Did I not know a specific topic or interpret the question/answers incorrectly?). While I did wo...