Dateline 2/13/06

Wow, what a week that was. It started out like crap as I had a bad cold, but I still got everything done. I managed to finish off the last week helping Peer Health exchange launch by making two announcements and going to 2 meetings as well as the ending party on Friday. It turns out that BU had the most successful launch ever, getting over 200 info session attendees and over 90 applicants for the leadership positions (3 times as many as Harvard BTW). Anyway, that's over, but broomball has just begun. I organized a team of Pre-med students and we had the kick-off captains meeting on thurs. I am not sure what our skill level is going to be, but we have a lot of people and it will be a good time. As for other premed business, we had a planning meeting last Sunday to lay out the semester events, I went to the consortia meeting to coordinate with other student groups (waste of time), I spent hours wed. at the activities fair trying to get new members (1), and we had a meeting with former BU president Dr. Chobanian to finalize a guest lecture as one of our events. We also had our first meeting tues. and watched that NOVA special about becoming an MD, which really makes me want to try again at getting into medical school. That is not an option for next year, however, which lead me to negotiations with two programs about a possible one-year research stint. The first is the BU med. school lab that I am working in now. The prof. wants to have me as one of his students and believes he could get funding to pay for the MS degree if I work there another year. I really wish I could, but financing this option looks like an impossible task at the moment. The other program that I started talking to last week is the NIH NIAAA in-vivo studies lab. I had put a resume into the NIH's research student clearinghouse system but I had not expected to here from them for a while, if ever. To my surprise however, I got an email on Mon. (3 days after the application cleared!) asking me to direct my interest to a particular project involving mouse brains. Turns out the team is looking for a biomedical engineer and my name came up as a candidate. This seems like a good opportunity, will have to see if this goes anywhere...
Also last week, on Friday I went to the Dean's list reception, for the first time since freshman year. It is nice to finally take a few classes that aren't curved to a C+, which I inevitably get B's in for some reason. Actually, I carried a 3.7 last semester and hope to match that this semester as well. It would go a long way into making that second pass at med school admission more successful than the first. I had a linear algebra test on Monday that may not help this cause however, as I felt ill during it and probably did not do that well.
On the entertainment front, I went to see the Blue Man group on Friday night. It was not quite what I expected, but it was enjoyable. It was more prop comedy and less performance art than I thought it would be, but it was very funny. Also it was free, because they have this program that if you usher for the show and clean up a little afterwards, you get free seats (and they were good seats too). Much better than just hanging around the apartment drinking, watching TV and playing Risk, which is what I did yesterday. We were also supposed to go play paintball today, but the snow storm has postponed that until next week. Anyway, I crammed a month worth of activities into this week, so for the next 2 I am going to try to take it easy.