Cartilage Seminar, PBL, POD, and CHI

The speaker for today's seminar was another biomedical engineer, and he was really awesome. He started out by telling us that the purpose of the seminar leader was to amuse the students so that we could return to our books feeling refreshed. How can you not like a speaker like that? Plus, the course director brings us junkfood. We had blueberry muffins on Wednesday and chocolate chip cookies today. One of the most interesting things the speaker told us is that leather, like our bones, is mainly composed of Type I collagen.

Our PBL session today was really good. We didn't have any case to go over at all, and all eight of us had learning objectives, so we spent the whole time going over them and discussing the concepts. I think it was one of the better PBL sessions that we've had. I learned a lot. Our midblock evaluations for PBL have to be completed by Monday. I'm going to do mine over the weekend.

Today's POD speaker broke the general rule that MDs tend to be more interesting speakers than PhDs. He started out by telling us all about the people in his lab. He actually had made a color-coded flow chart to diagram how the chain of command in his lab is set up. Then he went through all of the grants he had gotten with us, too. At the end of nearly half an hour of this, he stopped to comment that he was getting concerned because none of us were asking questions! After that, he started telling us about his actual research, and that part of the talk was a lot better. He works on using stem cells to help heal serious bone fractures. Basically he is a tissue engineer.

All morning, it was snowing like crazy. I was supposed to work at CHI this afternoon, but the coordinators decided to cancel for today since the weather was so bad and the M2s had a class meeting anyway. I wound up going to the gym and actually got home nice and early, which was a welcome surprise.