First Day of Medical School

Today was our first day of actual medical school. We started out with a half-hour orientation in the library, followed by an hour and a half-long problem-solving session (PSS) where we were divided into four groups of eight. The PSS basically consists of us being given several questions to answer. Some can be answered from the assigned reading, and some have to be looked up using various library or internet resources. Most are pretty direct (ex. explain how X or Y works), but a few are research-type questions (ex. how would you show X or Y experimentally?) We didn't know what we were doing at first, and so it was kind of bedlam. But this was our first time, so some confusion was to be expected. The good thing is that there is a facilitator who is there to guide us and get us back on track if we go off on a big tangent, and we really needed her today! I think one of our biggest problems was that we spent too long on the first question. Later on, we figured out that it would be a lot more efficient if we divided up the group of eight into a few smaller groups, and gave each smaller group one question to answer. Then we could all get together as one big group to discuss them all. We also want to try to figure out how to project our notes on the screen so that we all can see them instead of just one person having them on the screen. We do our next PSS on Wednesday, and we are going to try spending one hour answering the questions in subgroups of two or three, and then the second hour discussing them all together as the entire group of eight.

After PSS, I went to the lab and got started on my project. I am going to be learning to grow bacteria, isolate the protein of interest, and then study it. I told the researcher who was going over the procedures with me that it looks pretty work-intensive, and she agreed. She said it takes three weeks to get the protein produced and purified, so that is a third of my summer right there. They are going to do an experiment with it tomorrow, which I am going to miss, but they said they'd go over the data with me on Wednesday. I won't be going to the lab tomorrow because in the afternoon, we are doing mandatory CPR training. This evening I read the CPR textbook. In the morning, we have an ethics seminar at Lerner. Luckily, it doesn't have any reading for us to do!