Hey Guys!

So this is my first of hopefully many more blog posts to come.  Let me start by introducing myself.  As my profile mentions, I am a 2nd year medical student at UofT and previously completed my undergrad at York University in Biomedical Sciences.  I have lived in Toronto my whole life, and I am glad to have gotten into UofT med because I am not sure how life would be if I had to leave my hometown for good.

Class for us 2nd years just ended last Friday, Dec. 18th/09, and man was it a relief!  Yay! Now we have 2 weeks to chill with family and friends! Right? Wrong! The lingering thought at the back of my mind was "Now I can catch up on 2 weeks of FMP (Foundations of Medical Practice - more on that later), I can finally register for the USMLE Step 1, do some cardiology research, and apply for some rural experiences for the summer!".  Moral of the story? When I am not in med school I can't help but feel the need to do med related things anyways.  In fact our course director for FMP, Dr. Martin Schreiber, even said to the whole class last week "Try not to study too much during the holidays".  While there is clearly some jest meant from this comment, there is also a hint of truth too.

Med students are inherently hardworking and ambitious, and of course in love with medicine. So can you blame us for not being able to exclude medicine from our lives for even 2 weeks?

So what did I do during this first week off? Well I chilled with friends of course.  I had a few undergrad friends over on Tuesday Dec. 22nd/09, to play Singstar a christmas gift from a close med friend that I opened early :D. Yes I do enjoy belting cheesy songs and Singstar definitely helps!

However what had I done earlier that day? I had met up with my DOCH supervisor for the DOCH II Community Research Project.  DOCH (Determinants of Community Health) is a course we have to take during each year of medical school to teach us about community/population health.  It has been previously known as DOH (Determinants of Health) and also HIC (Health, Illness and the Community), and from the acronyms you can see why the name has been changed not once, but twice.

Many people have complained about having to do this course, and while I agree sometimes it can be a bit of grunt work and a drag, this year I am finding the DOCH II project to be an interesting experience.  For the DOCH II project we each get partnered up with a community agency, such as a food bank, a homeless shelter, or a community centre, and we have to complete a community research project with them. By no means is this meant to give the entire class publications. Instead the goal of the project is for your research to benefit the agency and in turn its target community. At the same time we are meant to learn more about community research and all that jazz.

For a long time I have been involved in social justice work, and in particular I have worked hard in anti-poverty initiatives to end poverty, especially child poverty, in Toronto and Canada.  So it was quite my delight to have been paired up with a women's homeless shelter in Toronto, and tasked to do a project that will involve interviewing previously homeless women who now live in supportive housing, and determining how their social support and housing needs are being met by their new housing environment.

So that day I met my DOCH supervisor, and updated her on the status of my ethics application (My ethics application was accepted with only minor revisions required! - a good thing!).  Because most of the DOCH II projects will involve people, most of the people in my class have to submit ethics applications.  Take it from me, doing the ethics application was a nightmare and I am glad that after my minor revisions, that whole thing will be behind me.

Well enough about DOCH.  In a later post I will describe my horrible experience with the Ethics Application.  If I forget just PM and remind me - however it's not an experience I want to relive now.

Well it is Christmas Day and I gotta get some studying done before dinner, so I will post about the second half of my 1st week of break soon. Keep a look out for it!

Merry Christmas to all medhopefuls, and to all medhopefuls a good night!