Dateline 9/20/2007

I know it's been awhile, but I've been very busy. I am going to try to make more regular entries however, as I have gotten a new voice dictation system which makes reading these entries much quicker. To recap my current situation:

I am two months into my second year of graduate school and it has been a completely new experience for me. It has been driving me crazy because there is no set schedule and both classes and work are very irregular. The only class I am taking this year is pathology. I find this class very fascinating but it is difficult to take this class in a vacuum. We only had four hours of class this week, and it has been difficult to keep myself interested. I have been on campus a lot however, because I am also still working at the office and doing research for my masters degree.

As far as work goes, it seems like I am doing a lot when in reality I am barely making enough to pay the bills. I began this year excited about being a tutor for the first-year classes, however this is not worked out very well. Scheduling appointments has been rough because they tend to come in large groups and almost half of my appointments have canceled. Tutoring at Drexel is irregular and unpredictable so I have been supplementing that work by working in the office that I worked in over the summer. Now that the admissions work is over, I have been spending my time doing filing and other menial office jobs. This works out because the people in the office like me, however those feelings are not always mutual. I did have a stroke of luck a few weeks ago when I was in the Jiffy Lube reading a magazine. I read that private SAT tutors can make almost $50 an hour and I decided that I should go into that business. After two weeks of filling out applications and other things, I believe that I have gotten a job at Excel tutoring and hopefully we'll get started with a few students next week. I have not gotten a feel for this however, and I have no idea how this is going to turn out, as I've never done anything like this before.

As far as my research, I ended up in the radiology department which is something that fascinates me, however this project so far has not been very engaging. The doctor I am working with is a really cool guy, but he is very busy and has little time to meet. The main project that I wanted to work on still needs to be submitted to the IRB, and while I am finishing the paperwork, this process depends on residents who have better things to do. In the meantime my advisor has given me the job of digitizing some old slide sets into power points. This is an interesting job because I get to learn about different radiology diagnoses, however it is not really research like I was used to in engineering. As long as it gets me my masters degree I guess...

The other work that I've been doing has involved being a TA for the bioethics group discussions for first-year students. This has turned out to be a thankless job, although I do enjoy debating bioethics. The students frequently put me in a bad position however, by doing a very poor job or not bothering to show up. I feel that they are good at the class and I know it's because they have better things to do, but I have to mark them down anyways. I guess TAs probably felt the same way about me when I was an undergraduate.

On the social life front, I have been spending a lot of time with my girlfriend Lindsay since she has started class at Temple and moved to North Philadelphia. I will admit however that almost none of my other friends have been around and I rarely hang out with the people that I talk to in class, so that is pretty much my whole social life at the moment. On a side note, my best friend from high school's best friend from college has moved to Philadelphia area recently and is trying to make connections, so I have made an indirect friend.

The biggest thing in my life continues to be getting admitted to medical school. I have completed my AMCAS and all the secondaries for 13 allopathic schools, however my academic advisor from Drexel is holding up the process as he is still not written my letter of recommendation. I did hear from the first school however. My alma mater, Boston University, rejected me already. It took them only about two weeks from the application completion date and they sent the rejection by e-mail on Labor Day. I also have decided to apply to two osteopathic schools, although for some reason my AACOMAS application is taking forever to clear. As much as I hate BU for rejecting me, I do appreciate the timeliness. I am likely going to be waiting for all the others for months, and it is very nerve-racking.