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Hi Again!

So I’ve just completed my orientation yesterday and there are currently so many emotions/feelings swirling around me from the experience. I’m sure this would be more interesting in a video format but I don’t think I can bring myself to venture into learning how to do that just yet.

And also the fact that I start medical school for real in like 3 days.

Side note: ^^ They may or may not be my favorite series of movies. And I may or may not be trying to get E to do the bit involving Vector and the girls in the cookie scene when I slip it into conversation….

Moving on.

What were we talking about? Oh yeah orientation.

So orientation for us was 2 weeks long. It felt a bit excessive and definitely the first 3 days were by far the longest and hardest for me to digest. I was so.freaking.salty. during those 3 days. But the second week was much easier to digest and actually flew by pretty quick. And yes, I was less salty during those.

Story time! In my house growing up my mother was pretty crabby according to my father. Which I apparently can also get hella crabby. There are a couple of ways E and I say it to each other or that I’ll say it to people in general: crab monster and crab on cycle. [Shout out to Dr. Agbas who initially taught us the Kreb’s cycle last year, and in order to get us to remember it he put a slide that said NOT CRAB ON CYCLE (insert crab on a bicycle picture but I couldn’t find a good one). So this is how I decide to refer to myself when I’m crab].

Back to the original story time though, when my mom was being crabby, my dad would ask if she wanted a glass of salt water so she would feel more at home. So of course this only pissed her off more.

And yes I could have used a giant glass of salt water those first few days.

Orientation Overview:

Okay, since KCU did not release the orientation schedule on their public website (just their internal website that only students and staff can access), I will not be posting the actual schedule. But, I can give you a general outline. Also, they did extend orientation a full week from last year to add a new section titled “Med School 101”. More on that later.

For the first week most days started at either 7:30 AM or 8 AM. Usually they would serve breakfast about a half an hour before we started that first week since we were there so early. The day would end anywhere between 5 and 6 PM on the first week.

Week 1, Day 1:

Breakfast and packet pick up: a packet courtesy of Student Services that gave us information on the YMCA here in town (paid for in our tuition since we don’t have a campus gym), station information, health clinics in town, who our advisor was, and our locker # and combination. It had a lot of useful information in there.

Lots and lots of welcomes from deans, president & CEO of our university, and plenty of staff members. Some get to know you stuff happened in there as well like individual introductions. And yes, I was reminded that I still sound like Minnie Mouse…

There was a time in this day where we had “stations”. There were about 10 or so stations where we needed to pick up/get information on some important things. I.e. picking up iPads & help setting this up (since E & I did COB, we were not getting a new iPad so we skipped this), health insurance information, YMCA information, tours, white coat pickup & exchange if needed, and taking photos for our school ID badges. At our campus you cannot enter the building at certain hours without a badge, and you cannot access certain areas within the building without a badge as well.

And that was pretty much it for the first day. There were also additional activities that the student services threw in for us to do to get to know our classmates and have some friendly competition. We ended up doing a scavenger-type hunt but with taking pictures around town. Trying to leave the parking lot to go partake in that activity was very nerve-racking; I’m surprised no one ended up in an accident as everyone dashed out to their cars to head out to the activity.

Day 2:

Another early start. We started having lectures on some of the surveys we were told to complete (oops, I did like 1 out of the 5 they wanted us to do…) and what the results of the class as a whole were and what they meant.

We also had a 2 hour-long professionalism talk….

Pretty sure that was due to a small group of students from last year. Really appreciate having to sit through that guys.

But to be fair, I’m sure there were several people in my class who had never worked a job in their life, had no real-life experience, or who desperately needed to be told about professionalism and how important it is in this field.

And then more introductions/lectures on some important things we need to know from the school. I won’t bore you with the details, but you do sit through a lot of talks that are lecture style during this time period.

Day 3:

Another discussion/debrief or two on a survey results for the class, more talks from different services at the university, and some team-building exercises built into the day. This one involved trying to build the tallest building out of spaghetti noodles and marshmallows. And basically my team gave up so we just threw our half created messes into a pile and titled it “Life in Medical School”.

We definitely should have gotten points for creativity but hey, whatever.

Day 4:

We care day! This is where the class gets divvied up to different volunteer organizations for half a day to volunteer at. They did this in the COB program (or will for this year’s class when they come for orientation), and the other campus had one as well.

I volunteered at a park that was taken over by the state. We went into the woods to help clean up graffiti, clear paths/walkways for those coming through the trails, and picked up trash. And yea, I found many ticks on me that day unfortunately. And yea, I freaked out real hard on that too (I am in no way an outdoorsy type of girl).

After that we could pick up our ID badges and medical supplies if we ordered them, got to eat some cookout food, and then could go home.

Day 5:

We loaded a bus to drive a few hours to get to the other campus for a barbecue lunch, getting to know our peers at the other campus, and team building/hangout sessions for a couple of hours. Then loaded the bus and came back home to be dismissed.

It took the whole day to do this so I was happy we didn’t have anything extra to do!

That Weekend:

We had our white coat ceremony. Possibly more details on this in another post, we will see.

Week 2, Day 1:

This is where we started Med School 101 officially, even though all of the survey debriefs/lectures were technically considered part of this. The main thing I took from this part of orientation was to really figure out you as a person, and how you can adapt to a newer environment that is medical school. This involved learning styles, personality tests, how we felt about ambiguity, and a couple of other surveys. If you already have a good sense of self and how you study, handle things, then this can be very repetitive and not useful to you. However, if you are someone who is still trying to figure this out, this may have been helpful in some aspects!

We got to overall start later this week. So either at 8:30 AM or 9 AM and were done anywhere between 4:30 PM and 5:30 PM. So a little shorter of a day (which was much appreciated!)

Day 2:

More debriefs, lots of small group/team building activities and discussions. This time we had to build an exact replica of a lego man, but only one person from the team could go down and look (but not touch!) the sample lego man. Not going to lie, it was difficult to do with only one person at a time being able to look at the lego replica.

Some lectures on the how the brain learns/works while learning and a few last-minute presentations on some additional campus information.

We also had a brief orientation for the hospital we will be working at this first year in our Principles of Clinical Medicine or “How to be a doctor” course. We will be having a couple of hour shifts there where we shadow or partake in some activities as a medical student to start getting us acclimated in the student doctor role.

This is going to be interesting for me. Mostly because as a previous scribe, I witnessed so many things, but couldn’t actually partake in them. Being on the other side is quite nerve-racking, but also exciting!

Day 3:

We had our first OMM or osteopathic medicine lecture/intro to the course during orientation. I’m assuming we will go more in-depth with the information they presented to us on the first day.

I got to pick up my bone box that day and learn about the dual degrees that are offered within our curriculum. And my god, the bone box is so. freaking. heavy. Let’s just say I made E carry it out to the car and into the house after that.

For those who are interested, KCU offers an MBA in business and an MA in bioethics on top of the osteopathic degree.

And then of course a few more debriefs on learning and learning about ourselves and some group activities.

Day 4:

Last day! Woo!

We had one last team building exercise, a panel with some OMS II students so we could ask questions, and a couple of more debriefs/lectures to listen to.

And that is basically how my orientation went. It was long. It was a lot of information. Some of the parts had too much interaction with my peers for my liking (and on these days I needed to decompress hard once I got home). But overall I came out making some pretty great friendships and feel pretty comfortable on the campus!

How I feel about starting:

Well… I feel a bit like this:

And also that.

So yeah. I’ll let you know how it goes from there!

Thanks for reading! Let me know in the comments below what you would like to see next.

Holy shit.

Exam time is finally here.

Shit. Shit. Shit. I’m not prepared!

This was usually my line of thought every single damn time we had an exam week roll around. Again, reviews are going to be your best friend before the exams.

I mean, I feel like I’ve written a bunch on the reviews for tests in previous posts already, but I will give it one more go for ya’ll just so you don’t have to hunt.

Exam Time:

KCU uses the app called Examplify. Pretty much the night before you take your exam, you are able to download it. You get an email telling you the time that it is available to download and other specifics about what time to arrive the next morning and what is allowed/not allowed. It doesn’t ever change (the information in the email other than the day and the test you are taking) so you don’t have to worry about things changing on you. You should download you exam that night. If not, you need to make sure you get there early enough to download it. Too many classmates would wait until right before they took the test and then the app would crash or their exam wouldn’t download.

So don’t do that.

Exams for my class would start at 9AM sharp. We would need to be in our seats by 8:50AM and have the exam up and ready.

Ipads had to be locked into the program, with wifi turned off and on airplane mode. Once everyone was seated, a code/password would be displayed on the screen. After you type this in, hit the accept button for a few prompts (which includes that your program will self lock and you cannot exit unless you hit the exit button), add another password, and then you start! If you try to get out of the program (like to look something up) and then get back in you will automatically fail as they will assume you were cheating.

It’s confusing the first one or two times but after that it’s pretty straightforward. They will give you a quick once over during orientation so you can see it. But I guarantee you’ll forget how to use the app once the first test week rolls around (because I sure as hell did).

Tests were usually anywhere between 45-65ish questions. See the post about the Inside Guide to Your Professors* for the specifics of how they test. Biochem and molecular would usually pull 5 questions per lecture to test on, but this was not, I repeat not a steadfast rule.

There is a countdown on the top bar so you know how long you have left in your test. There is also a calculator, a flag, and some other tools on the right hand side should you need it as you cannot leave the app during your test. Below is a snapshot of a sample test in the program. In the real test, over by where the submit & exit button is in the photo is where your countdown timer is. The submit & exit appears after you have answered all of the questions. You must submit and upload your exam before you can exit the application and leave the test (or they count this as cheating if you try to leave the application in a different format).

If you have time, I suggest you go back and check your answers at least once. If not for the content, to make sure you picked the answer that you originally intended. My first test week the program glitched and got super touchy, and answers that I know I didn’t choose ended up being my final answer because I touched the wrong part of the screen. Subsequently, it counted it as a different answer. Since I didn’t check, I got the answer wrong.

Learn from my mistakes and double check your work.

Reviews:

For Dr. Zaidi & Dr. Agbas: They each have a review session that they give before each test block that they teach in. They both have a giant slide set that will have all of their slides from all their lectures in it, or will have most of the slides from all of their lectures. This means that you will have a slide set anywhere from 100-200+ slides. This is why in the previous post I mentioned above, you do not leave their information until the last second. Every thing they teach is fair game for a question to be pulled from, so you need to know it all.

Dr. White: He will have a slide set as well, but usually his slides are off of the main topics/high yield topics that he has at the end of his lectures. So the way his lectures are set up are all his normal slides, and then at the very end he will have condensed slides or example topics that he pulls for (most, not all) test questions. Sometimes he uses the slides that he puts for the condensed version at the end of his lectures in the review, other times he pulls the original slides for his reviews. These can also tend to be long, but that is usually because there is only a few sentences per slide. His stuff also during my year tended to be the last few lectures before test time, so they were pretty fresh in my brain at that point.

Dr. Kincaid: Again, if she gives a review, go to the review. She will usually point you to the topics of what you need to directly know and will tell you the topics of the essays/short answers. She does like very specific detail and can ask several questions that are detailed oriented, so her reviews help point to a chunk of the detail she is specifically interested in. She does not always give a review though.

Dr. Anderson: I’ve stated this one enough; go to his reviews. He will narrow down the topics and give you what you need to know for 90-95% of the test. He will usually only throw 1-2 questions on there that you haven’t seen before to see how well you actually studied outside of his reviews. Typically for him, his reviews obviously gave me majority of the answers, but I would study based off the posted review he gave us so I knew the information inside and out no matter which way he asked it. Because even if he uses the same topic/question, he will word a few of them differently which means the answer is different. But if you study based off the learning objectives/reviews he gives instead of just memorizing the straight question, you will understand the concept better and answer any question he throws you based off that topic.

Dr. Segars: He will try to give a review. If he is able to, he will set aside one class period to go over the main topics we learned. If not, he will end a class partially early and use the rest of the time to go over the review. You do have a solid review with questions in tutoring though.

Dr. Shnyra: He can give a review, but usually the review/questions in tutoring were more helpful for me. Also the questions sets he sends us himself are the most helpful (compared to the in class review, unless he is going over why the answer is correct on his question stem), as you can figure out how he writes his test questions.

Good luck studying and kick some ass this year! Let me know if you found this information helpful down in the comments below and what you would like to see next.

Author: admin

Medical School Orientation. I’m Freaking Out…