Alrighty, I've got some more time today, so I will try and respond to the posts:
washkeep - Yes, the Calculus course I plan on taking will count for medical schools. I thought that I explained this before, but I will do so again. I panicked when a fellow pre-med student told me that it's better to take the Calc with Analytic Geometry in it. Well, I'm not a math person, so of course I ran over and talked with my pre-med advisor about it. He told me that med schools don't care. So that means that my Calc course will be okay. He told me that just as long as the Calculus course meets Physics requirements, it will not matter (all of the non-general ed Physics courses here require Calculus, but the Physics that I have to take for my major is a little more "watered-down").
angelic02 - Here's the order I ranked it:
1. Medical Pulmonary
2. Oncology
3. Gynecology/Urology
I have a feeling that Gyn/Uro would be the lowest ranked for most of the volunteers. It just sounds too messy for me. I myself had a difficult time in figuring out #1, but I am very interested in Pulmonary Diseases (having suffered asthma myself when I was younger...). Oncology also sounds interesting in that the patients and care for them sounds interesting. I would love to work with terminally ill patients because they are probably the most insightful people (about life and living) that I have ever come across. So, I wouldn't mind going to Oncology, but my interest in lung diseases beat out my interest in caring for cancer patients.
It's not that I can't handle it. I totally can, as I have experienced death on a very personal level before (my father died about 1 1/2 years ago)
🙁 I am also volunteering at a hospice, so death, well, when you experience it on a personal level, you tend to become de-sensitized to it on other levels. At least that has been my experience.
My Fall semester starts on the last week of August. I plan on taking Cell Biology, the 2nd semester of General Chemistry, and Calculus, all in the same semester. Last time I checked, my valued sections were still open. I hope that they still will be when I register come Thursday at noon (Pacific Time).
agent - hey dude, I didn't been to be insensitive myself, it's just that I thought that I would document what I have to do and thought that having to help bathe and clean up after elderly people would make everyone grin
😀 I wouldn't mind though...it's probably the smell that will get me more than the looks of doing it.
That reminds me...the last question asked in the interview was, "CODE BROWN: If a nurse or aide asked you to go and help clean up a patient who has recently had a bowel movement, would you be comfortable with doing it?" The obvious answer should be YES. If it is a NO, then volunteers would not be accepted into the program. I'll do whatever needs to be done, so that's not a problem for me if I can go wash my hands before and after, and wear gloves during the cleaning.
By the way, agent, does your wife know about living frugally? That would certainly help pay the bills better if she did. I know that my mom has made everyone at my home live more frugally so that we could pay the bills with the lower income (um, what without my dad here and all...he was the sole provider and my mom was and still is a stay-at-home mom) I don't mean to offend you, but it's just a suggestion
😳
Cozmosis - that sounds great. Glad to see that you are done with Chem and that you did pretty well in it. I think that you should just go with what you like, rather than what offers the most/least courses, though. Hopefully your pre-professional adviser will let you know what's right and what's wrong.
2badr - The Clinical Care Extender Program has been around for a while...it's currently active both at HOAG Memorial Hospital (the place I'm doing it at) and Citrus Valley Hospital (premyo2002 is volunteering over there). The program is set up so that pre-health students will get the clinical exposure/experience that they so badly want, and it also frees up time for nurses to do more important things than cleaning patients and getting them water
😀
It's also very cost-effective for the hospitals because as we all know, volunteers get paid $0, which means that there's no need to pay a nurse's aide to do stuff like cleaning up patients and making them feel comfortable, or hiring scrub techs to scrub in the OR people, or janitors to mop up the floor after the surgeries. Okay, well, those last bits didn't sound so well, but what I like about the program is that volunteers are also very important when it comes to patients. See, the patients are much more comfortable talking with people who aren't dressed up in scrubs or lab coats. I can develop my bedside manner by volunteering in the in-patient departments, as there may be some nights where volunteers have nothing to do except sit down and talk to patients.
The largest part of this program, though, that draws people in comes from the fact that the nurses and doctors are nice enough to call in the volunteers to see any cool procedures that they might have to do with patients. Especially if they like the volunteers, they will drag the volunteers in every time they have cool procedures to do.
I just kinda wish that I could have gotten into that ROP class so that I could go look for a job as a health care provider. I'm poor
😛 Hmm, maybe I can try and find a retail job in like a Pharmacy. That way I'll be learning about drugs and what they do
😉 I mean, well, since I finally got my clinical experience secured.
In other news:
Well, my group presentation went off without a hitch and now I won't need to be worrying about it so much
The history test will be tomorrow of course. Then I need to go and finish reading
All Quiet on the Western Front and do my 4 page term paper (due next week at the beginning of class).
I also got back my pop quiz in Psychology yesterday. The professor stated the score in points, but if we were to convert that to percentages, it would be 68% as the AVERAGE score in the class (I got 70%). You know what my Psych professor said of those findings? "I made this quiz too EASY for you. Next time it will be harder." Next time being the test on Monday
😱
Well, that is all. Gosh, I have so little free time!
