Second Day of Orientation

Today was a long, tiring day. We got our offical CCF ID badges, which is nice, because now we can get into the buildings without having to get someone to let us in. They gave us breakfast again, and then we had several presentations about the curriculum for this summer and for the next two years in general. During the summer, we will be having small group discussions covering biochemistry and molecular biology topics, as well as journal club. Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays we have discussion from 8-10 AM, and then we spend the rest of the day working in the lab. Thursdays are research days: no class. Fridays we have discussion from 8-10 and then journal club from 10:30-12. This will be our schedule until the end of September, starting this Monday.

We also heard more about the evaluation process. I will write more about that in a later post; I'm just too tired right now. At lunchtime, we were divided into groups with our new physician advisors (PAs). These are the people who will be responsible for helping us evaluate ourselves and assemble our portfolios. We signed up for library accounts so that we can check out books. I think it's pretty neat that the Lerner Institute has its own library. Case, of course, has several libraries, including one that is a medical history library with a museum in it. Since we are Case students, we also have access to Case's libraries.

After lunch, we had a second computer tutorial and learned more about the e-portfolios that we will be compiling on ourselves. However, the portfolios are not actually set up completely yet, so we basically just saw a demonstration of how they work. Again, I am not going to get into all of the details right now, but basically there are nine competencies that we must demonstrate. Each time we accomplish something that is evidence of one or more of those competencies, that evidence is put into our portfolios. And that is how we will prove that we've accomplished those competencies so that we can be promoted to the next year.

Afterward, several of us bought our books for the summer. We were told to get biochemistry, cell biology, and genetics. Some of the upperclassmen had said that we didn't really need the books that were recommended. But since there were reading assignments out of them, we M1s decided to buy them anyway. I also started working on those HIPAA modules and looking through the portal.

Tomorrow we have to be back at 7:30 AM again, but the good news is that the day will be short.