It has been a month since I last blogged. To be honest, blogging has not at all been on my mind up until this past week when my “summer break” finally started (I use that term loosely because I am, like many of you guys, working this summer, but it’s a break from school nonetheless).

The last month of medical school at UofT was the most hectic! May started off with our Brain and Behaviour final exam (passed!), followed by our Clinical Skills final exam (a practical exam known as an OSCE – probably the most fun exam of the year), then our Determinants of Community Health final, and finally, our Pharmacology exam (good thing this exam was only covering the last two weeks of school!). Without a doubt, we had more exams in our final month than any other month during the year – but I guess that made finishing all the more sweet.

Medical school was a brand new educational experience for me. While it is similar in many ways to undergrad, there are of course many huge differences. I definitely had to make adjustments, and when I couldn’t, had to deal with heavy lessons (that hopefully I better take into account during my 2nd year of medical school). The following are a few things I wish I could’ve told myself before starting the year.

Source: Clerkship Info Night Handout 2010, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto.

So this week, the 2nd year medical students at UofT have a big decision to make.  We have to rank our clerkship rotation schedule preferences so that the UofT clerkship matching system can match us.  In case you are not familiar with the matching process, or the rotation schedules, let me break it down for you.

I have to say that today has been a pretty good day.  Only had three hours of class, and the professors today were actually good.  I think I space out in class more than anyone (e.g. I don't think during class and mindlessly take notes unless the lecturer is really good and/or the material is particularly interesting).

For someone like me, today's main professor did everything right.  First, he had all of the important points listed in his notes.  It really gets on my nerves when lecturers hand out extremely bare notes that makes it impossible for you to both listen/understand AND have all the necessary information.  Don't get me started on lecturers that provide slides with three word sentences where the context of those words is completely unclear.  

Second, he went at a good pace - not too many slides/info, not too few.  Nothing freaks me out more than opening up my lecture notes and seeing that we need to cover 100 slides over the hour (obviously exaggerating, but you get the point).  Conversely, there are those lectures where the lecturer obviously did not need an hour to teach everything, but chose to anyways instead of letting us out early.

Finally, the material was explained in a straight forward and easy to understand manner.  It's never a good sign when everyone is confused by the end of class.

But today's professor did a great job in all three categories, so I was quite happy that I finally felt like a good medical student today (lol).

Passed my DOCH exam

This past Wednesday our first year medical school class was given our final lecture on Management for the year, along with the assignment of producing a one page document that shows where we see ourselves in 10 years (and considering that most of the lecture was about career planning as future physicians, I’d guess they want us to have some sort of focus on where we see ourselves fitting into medicine). There’s a ton of flexibility with this assignment (I know Mike made something in Photoshop), but as you can imagine, I’m choosing to write. And what the heck, I might as well write it here.

The truth is that I have no idea where I’ll be in 10 years. “Obviously you don’t”, you say to yourself, since I can’t see the future. But I really mean that I’m pretty conflicted over where I actually want to be in 10 years. I always thought I knew what I wanted, but the older I get (and presumably the wiser I get) the more I realize I’m not exactly sure what I want when it comes to my career. Perhaps it will help if I give you a brief time line of my thought process since I first began to be interested in medicine.

In high school, I thought I wanted to be a doctor. Not just any doctor, but exactly a “pediatric neurosurgeon”. Boy, that sounded cool. Imagine how awesome it must be to remove brain tumours from kids and completely change their lives. Not to mention how prestigious being a neurosurgeon seemed.

On Monday I had lunch with Alex Shipillo, a good friend of mine who is very smart, driven, and talented, and whom I always have good discussions with and learn a lot from.  The funny thing about my friendship with Alex is that I had talked with him and formed a friendship before we had even met in person (no, it wasn't E-harmony).

Alex and I both attended Shad Valley the same summer, but at different programs, but one of his best friends attended Shad Valley at McMaster with me.  We found each other on Facebook, discovered we had a lot of common interests, and began chatting and sharing ideas.

Since the start of this year, Alex has been the President of Impact - Canada's largest student-run entrepreneurship group.  The funny thing is that it was I, a few years ago, who got Alex in contact with Kunal Gupta, the founder of Impact, after not really even knowing Kunal (I had just met him briefly the week before).  But it seemed like a good person for Alex to contact.  Funny how things turn out.  (Or just my way of reminding Alex that he is in debt to my for life.  Just kidding though, as Alex is talented enough to have gotten to where he is on his own, I'm sure).

At lunch, we started off by catching up with how each other was doing.  I shared with him my progress with a project I was working on (and one you will all soon learn about).

But the biggest thing we talked about was basically about turning my life around and being more productive.  I think I don't come off that way, but I am super, super lazy and am very unproductive.  Really, I am.  I was very busy in high school and kept myself occupied with many cool things, but since undergrad, I have gotten very lazy.  I think it's partially due to my interests changing (and not finding things that really stimulate me) and partially due to my being way to lazy/burned out to take initiative.  I also think it's because I like instant satisfaction, and in the real world, you really got to put in the work and effort before you reap the rewards, and I struggle with that.

One key thing Alex talked to me about was developing better habits.  He told me that if I could pick up a habit and perform it 21 days in a row, it would likely stick.  So my plan is to pick up a new habit every 7 days, and hopefully after 21 days of performing each habit, it'll stick.  And I'll slowly pile on new and improved habits that will become a part of my everyday life.

So the first habit I've decided to pick up is getting at least 7.5 hours of sleep every night.  To be fair, I already broke this habit last night (in my defense, I was studying for my Determinants of Community Health Exam today).  Hopefully I won't break it again for a long time.  Some future habits I'm thinking about picking up include a small bit of daily studying, daily workouts, regular productivity with my blogging, etc.

I feel really unproductive a lot of the time, and hopefully this will help.

Oh yeah, big changes coming - like I've been mentioning for a long time, but things are finally ready.  MedHopeful is moving onto bigger and better things.  More to come in my next post.

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.

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"