End of the Fifth Week

It's hard to believe, but we're officially halfway through the summer session already. Most of my friends who are starting med school at other schools are just starting now, and some won't be starting for a few more weeks yet. In a way, it feels like I've been here for a very long time, just because so much is packed into each day. I can't say that I've learned much about medicine per se so far, but I've definitely learned a lot of molecular biology. And that is going to change when we start our clinical preceptorships in October. Our clinical preceptors have already been assigned to us. Mine is an internist.

Speaking of molecular biology, today was another PSS day. We covered translation of mRNAs to protein and processing of RNAs after they are synthesized in the nucleus. I think that today the questions were about the right level of difficulty and the length of the problem set was also about right. We weren't done early, but we weren't struggling to finish, either. The journal club articles were both related to nucleic acids. They were shorter this week than usual, but that doesn't mean they were any easier to read!

Tonight I am going to see Little Miss Sunshine with some friends. We actually don't have any reading from our books for next week because we are doing a special unit on bioinformatics. But we have a ton of lecture slides that we are supposed to read on line. I was looking through them, and there seriously have to be about 1500 of them, arranged into 18 sections. Luckily, most of the slides are pretty brief. But wow, that will definitely keep us busy this week.