End of First Week of NMS

Yesterday I had my Clinical Trials class. It was as painful to get up at 5 AM as I expected it to be. But on the bright side, the classes are only two hours now instead of three hours like last semester. Also, a lot of the material we're covering is basically review from my previous three MS classes, and the book seems pretty readable. There are five of us second years taking the class, plus one fourth year and a bunch of residents and fellows. In the afternoon, I went to the lab to get the rest of my data so that I can start preparing my poster. I can't believe I only have two weeks left until I go to the conference. I'm really looking forward to it, except that I will have a ton of make up work to do.

Today we finished our PBL case and then we had a seminar about fractures. I'm just not all that gung-ho about bones. Too many molecules--it's a veritable alphabet soup. The SAQs that we had to do this week were ridiculous in terms of the specific details they were asking for. One of the CAPPs looks like a good one, and the other is kind of way out there. Well, I guess one good one out of two is better than nothing.

POD is now called ARM, which stands for Advanced Research Methods. I can't decide which acronym is sillier. But I had kind of grown to like POD because saying that you're going to the POD sounds like something out of a bad sci-fi movie. Going to the ARM just sounds...gross. Oh, and apparently the administration has come to the same conclusion that I did about having first year grad students take ARM with us. Namely, it is a bad idea because they just started grad school and they haven't had a chance to learn very much yet. Now they will be taking ARM next year as second year grad students along with the second year CCLCM students (the current first years). It makes a lot more sense to have second year grad students working with second year med students.

Anyway, our ARM speaker today was simply awesome. He works at the Museum of Natural History and his whole talk had us absolutely cracking up. It was quite possibly one of the best seminars I have ever attended, kind of an informative lecture and a comedy show all wrapped up into one. You know, when a guy can make a seminar about something as dry as bone mechanics interesting and even entertaining, that is saying a lot. I wish we had it on video. I would actually watch it again if I could.