Week 7: Famous Last Words and Youtube Tech Tip

Jet Lag is Coming, by Fit Across Cultures

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I think my best writing for this class this week has definitely been in my frame-tale story that I am doing for the final project. I had to really give it my all to make the story pan out the way it does: Alice Liddell winds up getting segued into being a Snow-white type character, which brings that story line into the loop. I was able to use the character of Duke to keep track of the real world happenings of the story while using Alice’s perspective to bring a sense of the supernatural and psychedelic to the story. This turned out for the best I think, because I was able to concisely outline Alice’s experiences under the wicked Queen who envies her beauty (she is called the Duchess in this story because there will be a queen later on in future parts of the frame-tale).

My classes this week were fairly regular. However, I experienced some major trip-lag around Monday because I had gotten back at around 8am in the morning from visiting my original hometown. So I was extremely exhausted on Monday, and I was glad we had a snowday. I’m not sure if I would have been able to perform very well in my afternoon and evening classes if school hadn’t been canceled. So thank goodness it was! My organic chemistry lab was definitely going to be a disaster, because there’s so much work that goes into just preparing for it. I had only gotten a portion of what needed to be done for the preparations, so that snow day was a true god-send.

Overall, very busy week with all the catching up that my vacation trip required me to do, and I’m still feeling it! But I’ll make it through. Hopefully I’ll be able to work ahead in this class this week so I don’t have to stress out like I did this week.

Here's something to brighten your day, if you're a person who works with media: 

For when someone posts a compressed image/uses Windows XP to save a jpeg...

Famous Last Words Week 5

Thoughts of someone who knows french and browses the internet way too much

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So this week was a pretty busy one for me: got signed up for the MCAT, preparing a presentation on a scholarly article over epigenetics in psychosis, and I had an Ecology test. Not only that, but I'm studying for the MCAT itself, which is a mammoth of a task on its own. The main issue that a lot of people have when going into a full length MCAT test is the stamina factor: the new MCAT is 2 hours longer than the previous version and it'll require the student to be consistent throughout their performance. Thankfully, the new MCAT has their sections laid out like so: chemical and physical foundations of biological systems, sociological and psychological foundations of biological systems, biological systems and molecules, and critical reasoning. This gives a format that balances the time the student spends on the easier portions of the test relative to the harder portions.
   I think my best work in this class this week was my Storytelling, again, because I was able to find a way to make the original story's message more effective or just make the character's experiences more meaningful. This week I chose the Voyages of Sindbad, specifically the seventh and last voyage. I thought the original story was not very good at making Sindbad's experience very resolute in this tale. For me, the story's end is supposed to be the "punchline" of the entire plot, and I didn't get that impression when I read the original. The one modification that I wound up building into my retelling was that Sindbad experience different situations and creatures that he had encountered on his other adventures. I thought this would be a great way to show that Sindbad had indeed learned from all of his experiences and retained those lessons in his middle ages.

Famous Last Words Week 4

"A variety of topics involved with pharmacology, including neuropharmacology, renal pharmacology, human metabolism, intracellular metabolism, and intracellular regulation" from File Upload Bot on Wikipedia

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   I have to say that I was rather proud of my Storytelling post this week: I always put myself under pressure to make some part of the narrative that I'm retelling "fresh and new". I knew I had the capability to write a good twist on Arabian nights, but it took me a while to figure out what exactly I would do. The tricky part was: Arabian Nights already has so much inter-textual and self-reflective power by itself, just how Scheherazade tells the stories of characters within stories. So the only way that I knew I could enhance Scheherazade's mental game with the Sultan would be to add a new rule: that the Sultan would be given the chance to tell parts of the story as well. I wanted to retain that Scheherazade was still trying to win over the Sultan's empathy, but I thought it would be more interesting if the Sultan had become aware of her strategy and was given some power, and I think it worked out well in my retelling.
  My other classes are really starting to pick up their pace, but fortunately it's not too overwhelming (even with taking 19 credit hours total). In my psychopharmacology course we are finally getting to talk about schizophrenia and the anti-psychotics that affect it. I consider this a big step in my education as a future doctor, not just this subject matter, but the whole course in general. I think it's important that pre-medical students are able to take courses in their undergrad experience that make them feel like they're in medical school already, and my psychopharmacology is definitely one of those courses.
   That quality also goes for my experimental genetics and cell lab: we get to study unusual specimens and are able to make experimental conjectures about how the genetics of an organism are altered in both the natural and artificial settings (Makes me feel like a Jurassic Park geneticist! But really...).