post-MCAT

It's over! Yay! I have to wait a month to get my scores, and then hopefully, I won't have need to take it again. Either way, I'm enjoying a week off and loving summer!

The morning before my test, my pre-med adviser sent her listserv a transcript of a speech given by Dr. Atul Gwande to Stanford's graduating medical class this year. I enjoy Dr. Gwande's writing, and this piece is no exception. Reading it before I left to take my test was a good and timely reminder of why I was taking the MCAT in the first place.

The conclusion:

"You are joining a special profession. Doctors and scientists, we are all in the survival business, but we are also in the mortality business. Our successes will always be restricted by the limits of knowledge and human capability, by the inevitability of suffering and death. Meaning comes from each of us finding ways to help people and communities make the most of what is known and cope with what is not.

This will take science. It will take art. It will take innovation. It will take ambition. And it will take humility. But the fantastic thing is: This is what you get to do."

-Dr. Atul Gwande, The New Yorker, June 16, 2010

PS. The poison ivy is almost all gone. :)

MCAT

It's almost here! Yay!

It will be really nice to have this part of the pre-med journey finished. I find the material interesting in many cases, but the ordeal feels more like jumps through circus rings than authentic learning. As with any standardized test, the side effect of creating a bar over which students must jump is that they are tempted to focus on the bar, not the material.

In other news, I have officially been initiated as a cyclist. I had my first real crash on Saturday-- complete with an ambulance ride and ER visit. As it turns out, nothing is broken, and my gait is pretty much back to normal after several days of being gimpy. The most lasting evidences of my crash as of now are a) the large road rash on my forearm and b) the immense amounts of poison ivy all over my legs from the ditch in which I fell. Yay for taking up new hobbies?!?!