Last Day of Year One and Promoted to Year Two!!!!!!!!!!!!

We had a second seminar this morning about anti-fungals, but as for the rest of this entire week, it was very hard to stay focused. I spent part of the time finishing up one more last-minute eval that somehow hadn't been in my account yesterday. I wrote to the secretary and swore on my life that last time I checked all of the evals were complete, and this eval hadn't been there! It turns out that it was a computer glitch and not my fault. But even so, I still had to get it done right away if I wanted my MSPRC letter today.

I think we spent about half an hour in PBL. My presentation was the shortest, least complete one I've ever done. When I first got there, I warned my group members that I had twenty slides and a quiz for them. They were starting to argue with me because they wanted to get out early, and finally I couldn't help it any more and I started cracking up. Somehow, no one ever knows when I'm joking! I really only had seven slides, and my presentation lasted about 5 minutes.

At noon, we got our letters. They're a page long, and each one is personalized for that student. The first paragraph of mine says:

"Dear CCLCMer,

The Medical School Promotion and Review Committee met on June 6, 2007 to review your Year 1 Summative Portfolio. Based on its deliberation, the Committee determined that you met the Year 1 standards for all nine competencies and will be promoted to Year 2."

This is followed by two paragraphs about my specific strengths and weaknesses based on what I presented to them, and then a generic paragraph that we seem to have all gotten commenting about the organization of our portfolios. Now it's official: I'm an M2.

We had our last POD session at 12:15 right after we got our letters. I couldn't believe that they scheduled POD on the last day, and I figured no one would show up once they got their letters, but actually most of us did. The speaker does basic science research on preventing rejection in kidney transplants. His work was pretty interesting, but he had way too much material to present. I mean, today of all days was NOT a time when we wanted the speaker to go all the way through to 1:15 PM, which he did. At the end, he asked if anyone had questions, and no one said a word!

So, that's it for year one. We have four weeks off, although I'm only getting three because of my fellowship. Still, I'm looking forward to having some time to chill. I'm going out of town on Monday. Before I leave, I'm going to do consults this weekend with Dr. Tomford, who is an incredibly funny and very knowledgeable infectious disease (ID) doctor here. I'm not really thinking that I want to do ID for a career necessarily, but I just want to see what it's like while I have the chance.