Unusually warm day in January

And I'm at my desk.

Have midterms coming up: Histo a week from tomorrow, Physio the following Monday. Having a hard time getting motivated. I just don't love the material. Plus there are so many other distractions, like Belize, summer plans, apartment hunting, etc...

We had a couple of exciting things this week: on Wednesday we got our first experience with the human simulator program, and saw some pretty cool "real-life" situations. Later that day we had our first ASM clinical site rotation. I'm paired with Christian Garcia, and we're shadowing Dr. Michael Serlin, and ID attending at North General Hospital in East Harlem. We got to take histories and physicals on two patients, one with many infectious diseases (HIV, TB, syphillis, chyptococcal menningitis, etc) and the other with many chronic diseases (COPD, emphysema, hypertension, diabetes, etc). Then today was our first training session for the new EHHOP clinical managers. We have to come in two more times and shadow current clinical managers, and then by the beginning of May we'll be running it ourselves. That should be pretty exciting.

Keila left Sinai for the year. She's planning on coming back next Fall, but she'll have to start first-year again. It's sad to see another fellow SEP-er go.

By the way, the weather forecast is predicting snow tomorrow.

One semester down, seven more to go

I realize that I haven't written in a while, and I can't help but feel that as I sit here in Levy Library, all I'm managing to do is procrastinate.

I wanted to check in though. We're half way to the midterms of Histo and Physio, and I'm not loving the subject matter, I've got to be honest. It's been a bit boring, and I'm hoping it picks up. We are going to clinical sites this Wednesday with ASM, and I'm hoping that helps to pick things up.

I'm having a really hard time deciding what to do with my summer. No matter what idea I come up with, it seems to come to a dead end. There hasn't been a lot of support from faculty and administration (all my emails remain unanswered), and I'm starting to feel just as frustrated as I was before my trip to Mozambique two years. I know that if I end up volunteering somewhere on my own, I probably won't get a paper published, which should be a goal of mine. At the same time, I have absolutely no interest in sitting in a lab this summer, or working around the schedule of a Sinai professor.

So right now things like apartment decisions, summer plans, and Belize are much more stressful than class, which seems more like a distraction than the purpose of me being here.

I am just worried that things will things are going to get much more stressful when the classwork piles up.