Stylish Web Designer MacBook Air Giveaway

We all love free stuff don't we? Anyways Stylish Web Designer is celebrating it's one year anniversary and is giving away a free MacBook air! If you are interested check out the link: http://stylishwebdesigner.com/anniversary-giveaway-win-a-brand-new-13inch-macbook-air/

Goodbye's Are Always Hard

So, to give a bit of background information on this post, I was born and grew up in a fairly large city, so I had a really great university to go to that was right inside my own community. As such, I'm one of the select few who have never had to move away from home for undergrad or for medical school. I suppose many people who had to move away for their first degrees may have experienced friends leaving or having to leave themselves, but I haven't really had to experience that thus far.

I suppose I am coming to the age where instead of moving away for university, friends are beginning to move away for work (after having graduated). I just recently had to say goodbye to a long term friend of mine and it was hard for me to do. We had met each other back in high school and have been friends ever since. It's crazy to think of all that we have went through together, and how much we've both changed since then.

What makes me sad is that I realized although we would try and keep in touch and that we would always be friends, time would make us grow apart.

My friend would go off to a brand new city and become a different person. He will go through hardships and joys that I will no longer be a part of, or perhaps only remotely, and make new friendships and experience new things. Maybe he'll even meet the woman of his dreams there and get married and start a family. Likewise, I'll be stuck here and going through clerkship and residency will also make me a different person. Even if he decides to come back and visit home a couple years into the future, will it be as easy to talk as before? Or will it seem like we've spent a lifetime apart, and that really there is little for us to connect to each other with again.

So I sit here wondering if that's whats meant to be? Do people just move on and leave their old lives behind? As the next few years pass, more and more of my friends from long ago are going to be moving on, to get jobs perhaps even in different countries much less different parts of the country. Where will the future take my friendships? Will I grow closer to only my medical friends and lose touch with all the friendships that have been dear to me since my childhood?

What in the World do Med Students Do During Summers?

So, as I'm sitting bored in my lab and browsing around random websites with not a thing to do (but hours to kill), I decided to write an article on what in the world medical students do during the summer!

1) Research - We're all still keeners and the most hardcore of us can't get away from the idea that we have to make our summers productive and useful to our careers. Best way to do so? Do research. The most hardcore medical students will get themselves into clinical research and then some will do benchtop research.

2) Volunteering - So all those who decided research wasn't for them but were still hardcore will volunteer overseas on medical trips. They get medical experience and get to see the world, what could be better?

3) Shadowing - Some people just decided to ditch any formal jobs or arrangements and just spend all summer shadowing doctors instead. Great ways to build connections and gain clinical experience. Unfortunately not the best way to make money.

4) Working at high paying jobs - We all know research pays crap. Tons of us decide to just make a huge sum of money to tackle the debt. Often these jobs have nothing to do with medicine and are construction, serving jobs.

5) Travel for Kicks and Giggles - While there are still a lot of us that are hardcore, tons of people just decided to 'screw it' and see the world, not to volunteer or to be keen, but just for fun. It's one of the last summers you will ever get so why spend it working?

6) Nothing - Couch, beer, chips, tv.

Long Time No See!

Hey everybody... so for all those who do follow my blog, I know I haven't been posting very regularly. I got caught up in finishing up the year and was traveling for lots of the initial part of summer!

Anyways, I hope that for the rest of summer, I'll be on and posting a lot more!

This post will be about a video I found on another blog I follow. Here's the link to the video



Seeing the composition of a lot of medical schools across Canada, I think that this video really hits home on a lot of us. While I am in a slightly different situation since I was born here, I can still appreciate the difficulties and the tribulations that my parents had gone through in order to make a new life in Canada, the one where their children could have limitless opportunities and a secure place to grow up in.

I remember stories of what my mother used to tell me, how she came to Canada for the first time and couldn't stop crying everyday for the first few months. How she had left everything behind, her friends, her family, her hard-earned position in her previous career all to come to a brand new country, where she had no friends, no relatives, no secure job and reforge a new life.

It really strikes me that I have never even though of how difficult life could have been for our parents. How what we achieved now, couldn't even be possible without the work that our parents had done for us. While I like to believe sometimes that it was my hard work that got me into medicine, where would I have been had my parents not found the courage to abandon their old life and come to a new land where opportunities were available to their children? I suppose I'll end this post with a message of thanks to my parents and to their courage in abandoning everything to come to Canada.

I will try and post more often now that I am back in school. I've also been playing a lot of Starcraft 2 (I got picked into Beta!) lately and I might be trying some projects with that. Perhaps starting a fanpage for strategic discussion or maybe integrating that here!

Hallmarks of a College Student

It's 'that' time again. Things are starting to get tough and exam/school-related stress is beginning to heap up. Without further ado, I introduce to you the hallmarks of a successful college procrastinator:

1) The value of a nap is contrary to popular belief, not measured by the amount of time you spent in REM sleep, rather the amount of textbook pages that your drool managed to seep through.

2) Friends or study buddies are for chumps. Everyone knows the social area of the library isn't where it's at. It's that deep dark quiet corner in the top-most floors that's the place to study. You hope that once you have annexed your seat, not a soul will walk onto your floor, and since it's about 6-7 flights of stairs up, nobody ever does.

3) F**k facebook. Why-o-why must you tempt me to spend meaningless hours scouring through random people's pages?

4) Nobody uses pens anymore for notes. We all use the pretty little Staedtler fine liners so we can color code our notes (neurotic anyone?)

5) Tim Horton's is for posers, we all know the best way to stay awake is a direct IV drip of caffeine (this one is a joke, please don't try this at home, you will probably kill yourself :P ).

6) The extra weight you gain from eating unhealthily during exams and forgetting to go to the gym isn't something to be ashamed of. It is a trophy and testament to your ability to sit in a library study for hours on end and eat McDonalds, microwave burritos, and drink coffee.

... Written exams are driving me nuts. I hate studying, I can't wait till clerkship!

CANADA TAKES GOLD IN MEN'S ICE HOCKEY!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr9j-MRTxz8

We Work Hard, Party Hard. Friends, Booze, and Good Times

So, it's no mystery that med students are generally ranked as some of the most caffeine-fueled, sleep-deprived, and crazy stressed students on campus. But what may not be known is the social life of med students!

With the amount of parties and conferences that we have (practically one a week minimum) it's not hard to meet a group of really good friends. I think I've grown closer to my group of friends in the last several months than to most of my friends I met in my entire undergrad degree.

Aside from that med parties are perhaps some of the best ones on campus, rivaling that of fraternity/residence parties. You usually have a party every week and there's probably at least 50 people at attendance at any one of these parties. Perhaps it's because we all get so close through the year, but med students get crazy wild and there's at least one good story to tell from every single one of the parties. By the way, the picture just looks hilarious.

Of course boozing parties aren't the only ones that happen. There's tons of people who also organize other types of gathering such as potlucks, movies, and board game nights for those that are less inclined to go out boozing.