MS Class, Working on My Poster, Finishing Bones, and CCLCM Book Club

Yesterday's clinical trials class was again a review of stuff we had already learned over the summer and last semester. I'm not complaining though--at least one thing in my life is easy! I spent yesterday afternoon working on my poster, and unfortunately my preceptor is making me change things all around yet again. So I'll be doing that this weekend. Thankfully this will have to be the last round of revisions, because I have to turn it in to be printed on Monday.

This morning after PBL, we had two pharm seminars on treatments for rheumatological diseases. To say that the first seminar was poor is about as generous and kind as I can possibly be about it. Maybe that seminar leader was asked at the last minute to replace whoever was supposed to be giving the seminar, because I can't think of any other reason why someone would be that unprepared. The second seminar leader was considerably better. Our POD (oops, I mean ARM) talk today was a basic science one about several proteins involved in the vasculitis immune response. I was initially feeling wary of an entire hour-long talk that was chock-full of pictures of gels and immunoprecipitations, but it actually turned out to be pretty interesting. The speaker had given one of the POD seminars last year too, and this one was completely different.

In the evening, I went to the very first meeting of the new CCLCM Book Club. We had read "Better" by Atul Gawande. I was feeling really tired and cranky, and I almost didn't go. But in the end, I'm glad that I did go, because it was a lot of fun. One of the things that I liked best about it is that we had a mix of first, second, and third years. I had never thought about this, but having people from different classes meet to discuss ethical issues is a really great way to get a lot of different perspectives. I don't think it would work so well for PBL, but it might be useful to have some mixed-class FCM small group discussions.