master’s degree – We're All Med Here

Ah, graduation day! Finally! You’ve finally made it!

Well, sort of.

Hopefully in the coming years the schedule/calendar works out a little bit differently than ours did.

We had our graduation ceremony before we could actually graduate or finish the program. So at that time, we still had final exams, our comprehensive exam, and our mini-thesis due! This meant that graduation was conditional: You had to pass your finals and comprehensive exam, and you had to have turned in your mini-thesis and gotten at least a satisfactory job by your advisor before they could let you graduate. Which means a little bit more stress added onto your plate, especially if you were on the cusp of potentially not passing a course.

I’m assuming that the reason we had it so early was due to reservation of space many years ahead of time.

Because that is literally the only thing I can think of as to why the schedule worked out the way it did.

Negative Side of Walking Before the End of the Program

I walked the stage a month before I could actually be done with the program. Even though it was an amazing memory and I had a great time with my friends and family, I wish we didn’t end up graduating a month before I had all those hurtles left. At the time, it almost gave me a false sense of hope that I was done when really I still had the chance of not passing the program.

You had all the excitement of “graduating”, wearing the cap & gown, your family being in town, and walking the stage. Yet you had the let down of not actually receiving your degree and knowing full well when the weekend was over you had to go back.

See this face?

Yes. That is a proof photo. I’m to lazy & broke to buy the real thing okay? Okay.

Yea this was the my face the whole time only because I knew how much shit we still had to do.

Our graduation day ceremony was held at the same time as the graduating medical school class. So while they were all excited because they were actually done, most of us COB students were like okay yea but like I have to get back to studying so can we be done?

There were several classmates who did walk in the ceremony, but ended up not graduating/passing say their comprehensive exam or their finals. So this ultimately ended up being like a slap in the face to some of my classmates because they got to walk during graduation, but couldn’t obtain their degree. (In some cases they let you repeat one course so you could get your degree, in others they didn’t).

I’m hoping that in the future, the school will try to take that into consideration for the upcoming classes. But just the ceremony itself was a lovely ceremony and I’m happy my mom got to fly out to watch me walk across the stage.

We ended up having the ceremony on May 5th, and we took our final comprehensive test on June 1st. In early July I finally got my diploma mailed to me! Yay!

Positive Side of This:

Well 1) you get to graduate (as long as you don’t throw the towel in after the ceremony). 2) You get to walk. 3) You are almost done!

It was also very nice to have one of my favorite professors hood me during the ceremony! About a month or so before we were set to graduate we got to vote on two professors who would hood the COB students. We chose Dr. Anderson and Dr. Zaidi.

I believe the med students either choose a faculty member that they jived with or a family member who is also a physician to come hood them. There were even some couples and parents who got to hood the graduates! So in my case, I don’t have a family member who serves as a physician, so I will probably have a professor. In E’s case, he has a family friend that he could ask. And if his little brother follows in his footsteps, E would be super happy to hood him!

Our keynote speaker at the ceremony was an active female physician who practiced in a women’s oncology unit. She is a KCU alum and her story was incredibly encouraging and inspiring to hear. If there is one thing KCU knows how to do, it is pick alums who’ve had incredibly inspiring stories. Looking back, both keynote speakers for our white coat ceremonies for Joplin and KC were inspiring and fantastic as well!

They even had a 3 star general (who is also a D.O.) who spoke at our ceremony. He stated he was the command surgeon at the base during the Blackhawk down mission in Somalia. Talk about crazy. Also, can I say I’m thankful that I’ve only had to stay on US soil and go to school, living my happy little life? Because I am. I wouldn’t do well in a combat area. Or with pirates. Unless I pretend to be a pirate for Halloween…

But any who, let me reel it on back in from my rambling! It was encouraging to see the numerous amount of medical students graduating. It meant that someday I could too. And what do you know, I got the call to take me off the waitlist literally 3 days after we graduated that weekend.

Looking Back:

I cannot believe a year ago this is where I was. I’ve stated this before, but I really did not want to initially do a master’s program. I was so incredibly against it.

But honestly, when I made that last minute decision to move to Kansas City, it was one of the best moves I could have done for myself. Both academically and personally. I’ve said this in my Looking Back post; I needed to change the scenery, and the people.

A year ago from graduation, or the beginning of May, I was uncertain about my future. Am I getting into medical school? If not, how do I decide to use my master’s degree? Do I continue to pursue medicine? Where am I even going to live?

So many unanswered questions.

All of which I just needed to let the universe roll forward and to let life take the reins. So much has happened in this past 1 year alone (which honestly hasn’t felt like a year has gone by if I’m being truthful). Both fantastic things and some really upsetting things have occurred.

But I am grateful for the opportunities and growth that has occurred since graduating one year ago.

Cheers!

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.

Tag: master’s degree