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.

What do medical students do during their summers? Well for me, I did not take the usual route of research (~50% of UT medical students), traveling, rural electives, etc. Instead, I dedicated my last summer in achieving 2 objectives:

1) Start MedChatter
2) Shadow physicians from various specialties and decide a specialization for myself.

Since my life hasn't been interesting lately, I've decided to look back to my past shadowing experiences and share it with you guys. I will try to post on all of my experiences, so this post is the first of many to come.

I sit here typing this relaxed and in a pretty darn good mood. Although my first semester of medical school actually finished last Thursday, I've been too busy/lazy to actually sit down and write anything.

As I mentioned previously, one of the courses I take in medical school is the Arts and Science of Clinical Medicine (ASCM I) where we learn basic clinical skills. So far this year we learned to take patient history, vital signs (heart/respiratory rate and blood pressure), and some physical exams (precordial, peripheral vascular). Next semester we will learn more physical exams like neurological, abdomen, etc.

Okay not really much of a roller coaster, but definitely some ups and downs - sort of.

This morning I did my last anatomy dissection ever. We looked at the posterior part of the forearm and dorsal part of the hand (i.e. the back of the arm from the forearm to the fingers). Being able to see all of the muscles and their tendons, and essentially knowing how the arm and hand works mechanically was pretty cool.

So I got this nice email today…

"Liu, Joshua Paul

You achieved the following scores on the STF exams:

Blood & Gross Anatomy average: 84.3%, Your mark: 74.7
Histology average: 85.0%, Your mark: 67.5
Embryology average: 76.49%, Your mark: 70"