First Day? Kind of?

All right, so I had orientation today. A long, boring day of buying materials, meetings, and more meetings.

Imagine sitting in a room with 290 other kids while department head after department head are thrown at you, presenting information on financial aid, student council, and various student services.

I arrived around 9:00AM and ended up being parked right across from the one other kid at this medical school that comes from my undergraduate college. He and I walked together to the main building (Medical Sciences) and got lost in the frenzy of kids and tables. I went to the first table and got my name-tag and folder full of orientation-type goodies. It was an hour and a half of scurrying about, getting money from the union building, getting my (anatomy) locker key, buying packets of notes, getting pictures taken, and other odds and ends. Boring.

We shuffled into the lecture hall for a few presentations from the faculty. A nice Dermatologist lady introduced us to the class she will teach: Introduction to Clinical Medicine: Patient-Doctor Relationship. That class seems like it will be really good. Then the anatomy professor came up...that class looks like it will be a real trip! The guy is really nice and seems cool, though. He told us all about cadavers and how those people died hoping that their bodies would educate doctors who would, in turn, heal many sick people.

Can you imagine the impact then, that these dead people have on ultimately 1,000s of patients? Accomplishing that much after you're dead is pretty cool!

We saw that we would end up having to learn over 10,000 terms over the course of anatomy, and that's just the terms. Agh! What a trip!

A word on the fellow students: boring! I'm sure that as the year begins, I will meet some neat people, but on the whole, typical medical crowd. Sports, boring stuff, sports all over. How did a geek like me get attracted to medicine when nobody else in medicine is like me? I'll never figure out how I share that one common point of interests with all those people.

Anyway, I met Johnny for lunch and he told me the stresses of Dental School. The afternoon was just a bunch of boring presentations from various people, and we took a Meyers-Briggs personality-type indicator. It tells you what kind of personality you have or something like that...last time I took it I got INTJ. But whatever, ya know?

We got it driven into our heads a lot that we will "undergo a transformation from civilian life to professional life", and even the financial guy was telling us about how huge income comes with huge responsibility. Yeah, yeah, I just wish I were in college again where things are actually fun. I'm here to learn a profession, not deal with all this paper-work!

Hmm, so it seems like a really good faculty and school. I have plenty of escapes around my state so I know I can stay sane. I look forward to getting the most out of my school, and then moving on to a really enjoyable career in perhaps Emergency Medicine or Anesthesia!

I'm sleepy. I have more "activities" tomorrow, including the white-coat ceremony.