Med school, G-proteins, Life

Hey all,

Keeping a blog is harder than I thought. With the 1st year of med school in full swing now it's tough to get a moment to sit down and get my thoughts in order. I think the way to be more consistent is to be less self-conscious and just write. So that's what I'm doing now.

It's been a week into school already. We're almost done with the second week and our first test is on Monday! After the exam I'm going to take the time to back track and write about the first 2 weeks of school (there is so much to say). But for now, suffice it to say, I'm getting settled with my new environment and I'm feeling really good. I like being a student again; I really like my classmates and I'm quite comfortable with where I'm living.

At this very moment I'm studying today's lecture notes. Some have described medical school as drinking from a fire house. I'd say that's an apt description. For the time being, however, I've already drunk a lot of this water, and so I'm not overwhelmed. On the contrary, I'm a bit underwhelmed, at least in terms of the interesting-ness of what I'm learning.

Right now we're doing pretty much an abridged version of my biochemistry degree from undergrad. Cell biology, molecular biology, genetics, histology, etc. A lot of it is review, and very superficial review at that. It makes it pretty hard to want to sit down and study, even for a nerdy guy like me.

Today we got a sweeping lecture on signal transduction. We got the basics of receptor tyrosine kinases, G-proteins, the works. I've seen the basics of this before and the lecturer really didn't go out of his way to give us any penetrating insights about a usually very noteworthy topic. Oh well. Can't win um all. I know the work load and the novelty of the information is going to increase greatly in the coming weeks, so I'll be patient. But for now, I just wanted to vent and say: Wow, I didn't think the first week of med school would be so boring!

Anyway, I'm trying to get into a good sleeping schedule, so I'm off to bed. I look forward to writing a more illuminating post after Monday's exam. Until then...