Protocol Snow

I am so addicted to Team Fortress 2. When I can’t exercise any self-control, I turn to my buddy Temptation Blocker. It is a very cool app where you can block any program on your computer for a specified time interval. If you try to run the blocked program, a message pops up telling you to go back to work. And just in case you have to run that program, you can enter a 32 character password to bypass the timer.

Thank god for this application because I still feel like I’m on Thanksgiving break. Now to get some work done.

I spent the better part of yesterday shadowing a pediatric nephrologist (doctor of the kidney). It was interesting, but throughout the day I tried unsuccessfully to shake off an unsettling feeling. About two years ago, I was in a shadowing program where I followed around a bunch of doctors with an assortment of specialties to get a taste of what their jobs entailed. The goal was to observe the patient-physician relationship at work, and the experience was a reason (among many) why I was excited to apply for medical school.

You don’t actually do much when you’re shadowing; you just stand there and watch what’s going on, and the doctor discusses the case with you afterwards. But I was struck by how virtually identical that college experience was compared to yesterday. Back then I was an engineering major, months away from applying to med school. I am now a medical student and wear all the gear that identifies me as such: white coat with tie, medical center ID badge, stethoscope draped around my neck. Yet I didn’t feel any more doctor-y yesterday than I did two years ago.

In fact, I had an awkward sensation that I was an actor wearing a doctor costume. Perhaps doing some research for an upcoming audition by walking around the hospital and observing doctors in their natural habitat so that I can imitate them appropriately later. It was pretty unnerving. In two years I’ll be entering the clinics and will have the M.D. degree in four years. I still have a LOT of training ahead of me that will hopefully adequately prepare me for the real world. Because, christ, if I don’t feel like a real doctor after four years…

Anytime I get a break from hardcore med school studying, I like to quickly browse through my RSS reader and check out the latest gaming headlines. In doing so, I desperately try to cling onto any trailing threads that lead to a life I left behind seemingly years ago. Yeah, medical school isn’t easy. It’s only the end of the second week!

Anyway, Halo 3. Exactly one month from now. If there’s a silver lining, it’s that I’ve been on a near complete media blackout so whenever I finally get an opportunity to play Halo 3, it’ll be a completely fresh experience. I’m counting on Bungie not to let my anticipation be in vain. It might be Christmas break before I get to unwrap my Halo 3: Legendary Edition.

What’s the most hardcore stunt you’ve ever heard of? How about dropping out of med school to become a Halo 3 master?

Don’t worry, I’m not talking about myself. I haven’t gone that crazy yet.

…

This is why I leave my consoles at home, a few thousand miles away. I don’t even want to be tempted.

I had orientation last week and just finished up my first real week of medical school. It’s been pretty much a nonstop session of lectures, books, and studying. I feel like I’ve been here a whole month already. Oh yeah, and we got our cadaver on the very first day and started dissections. Not as scary as I thought it would be. Most of the time, you’re too busy to be actually thinking that you’re slicing into a dead body.

I’ve had people tell me that after majoring in biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins, medical school isn’t going to seem that hard. I’m not so sure about that, though I might have to wait until after a few tests before I can more accurately gauge. It’s definitely not going to be easy though, and my free time has drastically shrunk. I still have a backlog of posts to get through (I haven’t even posted photos from my vacation one month ago!) so those will be coming out… slowly.

I sure wish I could play Bioshock now.

I just got back from several days in Boston. It was my first time in the city and it’s not a bad place to visit, though I don’t think I would like living there very much, whether for work or for college. Boston’s kind of a sprawling mess with schools all over the place. I’m sure the college atmosphere is much more alive there (something that was quite lacking at my school), but now that I’ve visited Boston, I can appreciate the quiet, self-enclosed entity that is Johns Hopkins.

So yeah, I visited Harvard and MIT while I was there. My brother’s dorm room at Harvard is quite small and pitifully run down. I understand officials wanting to preserve the history and legacy of the buildings by not upgrading, but yeck, now I feel quite spoiled with the rooms I had. Call me unappreciative of art and history, and you would be quite correct.

Harvard Medical School

I’m not 100% sure of this statistic, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Harvard was the #1 most toured school in the country. There’s always groups of giant tour buses parked around the school with all the tourists curious to check out the students to see if they’re any “different”. Surely it must be distracting to go to school there and feel like you’re the exhibit!

The famous MIT “Great Dome”

MIT felt empty in comparison. Not much fun looking at nerds and geeks right? I kid, I kid.

If my life were a Xbox 360 game, an achievement would have just unlocked because I am now finished with college! All that’s left for me is the graduation ceremony itself. In the meantime, I’m busy packing up my things and getting ready to move out.

My itinerary for the next couple months: after my graduation ceremony, I’m headed up to Cambridge, MA to visit Harvard University and to help my brother move out of his dorm. Following that, I’m headed to Taiwan for a month. While I’m in Asia, I’ll be going on a tour of Hokkaido, Japan, which should be pretty neat, but my personal highlight of the whole trip is a self-guided, 4 day stop in Tokyo. I’m currently busy planning out what places I want to see and shops I want to visit. From what I hear, Tokyo should be pretty English friendly but somehow I don’t believe that and have a feeling there’ll be many times when I’m going to be completely lost with no English speakers around. It’ll be interesting to see how much I’ve actually learned after 2.5 years of Japanese classes…

I was planning on typing up a review of the iRiver Clix 2, but the one at Pocketables.net is so good I’m not even going to bother. It’s a fantastic review for a phenomenal product with tons of photos, so go read it.

Today was my last day of classes in my last year at college. Ironically, the only class I had today was General Physics II, a course usually taken by freshmen. Why I’m taking the course now is a long story about AP Physics credit and medical school admissions, but half the time I couldn’t/didn’t go to the lectures while the other half I sat in the auditorium grinning about the absurdity of the situation. It could potentially have been problematic though. I never fully understood electricity and magnetism (cue the question: why are you an engineering major again?), but luckily the several years I have over my classmates apparently gave me some additional intuition. On the first midterm I scored two standard deviations above the mean and I nearly aced the second midterm. Not too bad for someone who flinches whenever he sees the word “magnetic field”.

Yesterday was the really killer day though. I had a project due and two presentations to deliver for some senior engineering classes (though a hottie told me later that she liked my presentation, so it wasn’t entirely too bad a day). I’ve been working on the project 24/7 for basically the entire week. It was for a class called “Statistical methods in imaging” and my project idea was to track highways using something called the particle filtering algorithm. This class is out of my league and I would have dropped it in the first week if I could, but unfortunately I needed this to fulfill some graduation requirements. The good news is that some of the students in the class are in the same boat so we’re all sinking together. But while my project isn’t as refined or as advanced compared to one from someone who actually knows what he’s doing with statistics, I gotta say I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

Here’s a sample image of my program: the user clicks on the image to specify a starting point and a direction, and the program tries to trace the highway. It’s clearly not very precise, but I think it’s cool nonetheless.

I’m not completely done with college yet though. Two finals, two more papers, and one more project in the next two weeks. But those will be more low stress so I’m over the hump. Start the countdown to graduation!