ANTOINETTE: Musings from belligerANT

Hey everyone!  First things first, a little background…  I’m Antoinette Nguyen and I hail from the Lone Star State.  I (gladly) left home for college at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL (right outside of Chicago).  During my undergrad years, I toyed around with being pre-med.  Even though I completed the pre-med prerequisites, I was more about getting a solid liberal arts education, focusing on my history degree, and assuming that things would eventually fall into place.

I first applied for Fall 2005 entry, but I really wasn’t sure if medicine was the right path for me, which was transparent in my admissions essays.  While the rejections – and there were plenty of them – were crushing, they were truly blessings in disguise.  I had some new letters behind my name and a degree in hand, but I still had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.  Call it an early quarter-life crisis.  Yes, rejection was humbling but ultimately, it drove me to step back and reevaluate my life.  I ended up taking two years off after graduation.  During that time, I worked in the Vascular Surgery division at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.  I studied for upper-level biology classes and the MCAT (Round II).  I spent a month at a free clinic in Bolivia.  A year after that, I once again fed my addiction for travel and backpacked through South America for two months.  And through it all, I realized that I wasn’t ready to call it quits on medicine just yet.  Now, here I am, more than halfway through my first year of medical school at Emory.  I hate rehashing my AMCAS, but my point is: we all get here from different paths.

Now, on to the crux of this blog.  Interviewees are constantly bombarded with “Do you have any questions?” but I know I always had a few that I just didn’t feel comfortable asking in large groups with everyone dressed to impress.  Are the students liberal, conservative, apathetic, or just plain crazy?  How much time do you really spend studying?  What do you hate about Emory?  What do you love?  Does everyone say “y’all?”  What about Emory has surprised you?   What do you really do for fun?   How do you feel about living in the South?   Do you eat grits every day now?  How many married folks are in your class?  And then there are the nitty-gritty questions about the curriculum… You’ve got questions.  I’ll do my best to answer them.

Medicine is a long, hard road but it doesn’t have to be an unhappy one.  And being at Emory shouldn’t mean being a student 24/7.  Free time is a tad more scarce, but I still do the things that keep me sane and grounded.  Rather than wax poetic about the amazing students, faculty, and curriculum (not to mention the beautiful new building that is my second home), I’ll just say: I am happy at Emory.  The application process is a ten-ring circus and you’re jumping through hoops left and right.  I don’t really envy your position but we’ve all been there.  So, best of luck to everyone!

over and out scout,
Antoinette

KEVIN: This Entry is Only 70% Accurate

Hello readers! My name is Kevin, and I’m a first year med student originally from the SF Bay Area.

A little about myself: I went to school at UC Berkeley. I applied here because in college, I worked under Dr. Stephen Bonasera, a 1995 MD/PhD alum, and he strongly recommended that I add Emory to my already long list of schools.

After a short detour in the working world, I wound up here, and I’ve been enjoying it more than anyone should have a right to enjoy medical school. The medical school building is amazing, and the support from professors and fellow students has been phenomenal.

I’m supposed to mention highlights of the year thus far, but I could probably write a full blog entry for each one. Here are some highlights so far:

1. You might have heard of our Week on the Wards, where we first year medical students visit a local hospital for a 40 hour week and witness real medicine in action. During my week, I shadowed a heme/onc resident who showed me how to perform bone marrow aspirations. A lab tech taught me how to look at leukemia slides. A terminal patient lectured me and made me promise to be a good doctor. The week is simultaneously fun and sobering, and I’m not aware of any other school that lets its students do this so early in their curriculum.

2. Incidentally, the new curriculum is working well so far. While most schools teach their students by subject, our new curriculum uses a system-based method. The first few months are spent learning about healthy physiology and basic clinical methods. Then we learn about disease for the next 12 months. We are learning more in less time, but I feel that we are spending more time getting to the meat of medicine and becoming a doctor. This is a good thing.

3. The greater Atlanta area is, well, great. I’m definitely not going to run out of things to do. We as M1s spent a lot of our earlier, less busy, dare I say halcyon weeks going to bars and clubs and museums and restaurants.

4. If you’re from a big city and you like music – and who doesn’t – this is a great city to live in. There are a lot of concert venues here; most major bands that come near here will stop by in Atlanta or Athens (about an hour away). There’s also a lot of local and up-and-coming bands here also, if you like that kind of thing.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Here’s to a successful blog launch!

JACKIE: On Life and Emory

Hi folks. My name is Jackie Carr and I am from Miami, Florida. (Actually I just say I’m from Miami but really I’m from a suburb of Ft Lauderdale approximately 23 minutes from Miami). I am 28 years old and am therefore one of the “older” members of the class of 2011. If you’re going to be an “older” student, by the way, then I do recommend Emory SOM. The students here are generally quite sophisticated and cultured, I have found. We tend to think outside of the (sometimes restrictive) medical school box. But I digress… I went to Stanford University, where I majored in Philosophy, and graduated in 2002. I lived in SF for the two years following college, where I researched foster care in California for Human Rights Watch. (I also waited tables and hung out with the rappers and skaters and had an all-around good time.) Then I moved to NYC to attend Columbia’s post-bac program, which took me an entire two years to complete since I had done no premed classes at Stanford. This past year, before coming to Emory, I worked full-time at the Vascular Tissue Engineering Lab of NYU’s Institute for Reconstructive Plastic Surgery. Scattered throughout those years were your more-or-less standard, overly ambitious pre-medical activities (e.g. interning in the Neurosurgery Unit of Bangkok’s largest public university hospital for the summer).

Moving on from my personal history, M1 year of medical school has been great so far (though Anatomy has posed a major challenge, I must admit). Emory really encourages learning for learning’s sake, the importance of maintaining a sense of self, the necessity of true teamwork, and other progressive, humanitarian aspects of medicine that I believe are crucial to medical education (at least my medical education). My fellow students are bright, enthusiastic, down-to-earth, kind, pleasant individuals, and I am very happy to be at Emory. The school is especially fitting for someone like me who has taken time off and experienced life outside of school. Our curriculum consistently applies what we learn in class to outside-of-academia situations, and I rarely feel confined to the difficult-to-utilize classroom learning. In addition, our new curriculum translates the (loads of) basic science we learn in the classroom to medical practice, and therefore makes learning science all the more interesting. So, to summarize, I am thoroughly enjoying the philosophy, academics, and people here at Emory’s SOM…

TONY: Save this blog: It’s gonna be worth a lot of money some day…

So, I should probably begin by answering the question that I have always answered for people who have seen me on paper before meeting me in person:  “Wow.  Chin-Quee is such an interesting last name.  Where does it come from?”  Allow me to take you on a journey through space and time:  Many moons ago, England had some pretty strong interests both in China and the little Caribbean island of Jamaica.  My great-grandfather agreed to head on over to the tropics from China as an indentured servant, worked on a plantation for a few years, opened up his own ice-cream business, and sent his son (my grandfather) back to China for his education.  Unfortunately things didn’t go as planned, seeing as my grandfather (ever the ladies’ man) chose to have an ‘indiscretion’ with the daughter of his town’s mayor, and as a result was scheduled for a stoning in the town square.  He managed to skip town, hop on the next boat back to Jamaica, where he met my Grandmother, who had a few kids (including my dad), and subsequently moved to New York City.  My parents met each other soon after they both graduated college, and the result?  Anthony L. Chin-Quee Jr., your faithful blogging med student.

I suppose you could call my journey to med school ‘untraditional’.  I was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, and attended Harvard for my undergrad years.  I graduated in ’05 with a degree in Sociology, but didn’t come straight to med school.  At that point, I was maybe 80% sure that I wanted to be a doctor, and 20% sure that I wanted to be a teacher.  Thus, I chose to take a year and teach high school Chemistry.  Though it was an amazing and unforgettable experience, I realized early on that I could not do it in the long term—the changes that I felt the need to start making in this world required that I step far beyond the schoolhouse.  And so, the arduous Medical School Application process began—writing essays, making long lists of schools, saving as much money as possible,  etc., etc.  In my second year out of school, I headed back home to NYC and (in between flights out of town for med school interviews) got involved with an amazing non-profit called Portraits of Hope.  I worked with an unbelievable group of people on the city’s largest public art project ever:  Garden in Transit.  If you live in/around NYC you know exactly what it looked like—there were flowers all over the yellow taxis throughout the fall/winter of 2007.  Check this website to get the full story:  www.gardenintransit.org.

After working with GIT for several months, I packed up my entire life and moved to Atlanta to start this crazy med school journey here at Emory.  Why did I choose to come on down here?  The answer is pretty simple.  Yes, Emory has the prestige that any great university has—great professors, amazing opportunities for clinical experiences/research, etc.  Yes, it has a brand new curriculum and the sweetest facilities that you’re going to find anywhere.  But what really sold me on this place was the energy that I felt from the community here at Emory Med both on my interview day and at the revisit weekend.  It felt like family.  Plain and simple.  If you are applying to med schools right now, I’m sure you’ve noted that every school seems to have its own personality.  If I were to write you a blurb about the personality of Emory students, it would include words like ‘passion’, ‘drive’, ‘brilliance’, ‘creativity’, and ‘integrity’.  The professors at this school make it very clear that their goal is to turn out doctors who are not only competent but, perhaps more importantly, human.  So, we are taught to simultaneously hone our skills, and to bring our own gifts, our own personalities, to the profession.  All of this culminates in the creation of a culture that I don’t think that I could find anywhere else.

So yes.  That’s why I came.  Clearly, you should come too.

Until the next go ‘round,

-c-q

PEARL: Hold onto your horses, folks. This is my life.

Hello all,

This is the start of what will hopefully become a regular chronicle of my life at Emory med school. Before I begin sharing tidbits of my life with you, the hypothetical future Emory student, I’ve written out an introduction to my life – a little bit of context for future entries. Enjoy!

The easiest way to explain my life is to introduce my family. My father is a boatbuilder, who grew up in Tennessee, joined the Coast Guard after high school (claiming he never would have made it through college and certainly didn’t want to go to Vietnam), and then met my mother on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. My mama grew up in the Midwest, the daughter of an English war bride and a first generation German-American, who dropped out of her conservative college in the Midwest at her first opportunity and promptly moved to the Outer Banks so that she could be where the wild horses live. My oldest sister Wendy, fifteen years older than me, now lives in Miami where she works as a public defender and spends her weekends jetting about Miami Harbor with her friends on her boat. My sister Belle runs my father’s boat shop in Maine and has truly earned her spot in my mama’s heart by having two daughters (Daisy age 6, Anna 4) and one son (Ryder, 10 months). I am by far the baby of the family, totally spoiled with excessive education (three years at the state’s math & science magnet school in far northern Maine surrounded by potatoes, followed by four great years at the University of Chicago). I decided to follow up Chicago with Emory because I loved the people I met there, felt like the faculty and staff were especially supportive, and really wanted to train at Grady. As I figure it, the warm weather is just a bonus – but a fantastic bonus. Don’t let anyone tell you that you shouldn’t go south because there are no seasons. Seasons are way overrated, as you’ll discover for yourself when it’s 70 degrees in January (!). Life at Emory is great – I get to learn science and medicine by day, have fun with my classmates on the football field and out dancing on the weekends, and take occasional trips to South Georgia where I’ve learned to shoot a shotgun and eaten raw peanuts straight from the ground. In addition to football, I like to play soccer, basketball, and volleyball and then climb or play tennis when I’m not playing team sports. Other than that, I watch football (go Patriots!) and spend my time cooking, eating, and being merry.

That’s all for now – I’ll check back in with y’all soon!