My White Coat Ceremony!

Sometimes, I still find it hard to believe that this is really real life.

I tend to get overly excited about dental school pretty frequently, like when I got my first packet of information in the mail..
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So anyway, what exactly is a white coat ceremony? What happens?

Well, a variety of things - you sit with your classmates in an auditorium full of family and friends, as you listen to the Dean speak about the wonders of the dental profession. He'll mention that this weighty 350K investment is actually one of the best decisions you've made in your life. Then, you'll get on stage and introduce yourself to the audience, walk across, and be knighted into dentistry, draped in the symbolic armor of a white coat. And once that's over, you'll stand with your fellow classmates, and recite a pledge to strive for excellence, never to harm patients, and to uphold academic pursuit to the highest standard. Parents and loved ones will flood around, cameras will flash, and all of a sudden, it's over - but now, you're a little different. You can finally remove the "pre" from "pre-dental student", and it's time to get the show on the road :)

As I sat in my chair, I thought about each of my classmates. Everyone has a story, and the white coat ceremony embraces all the deliberate, and laborious steps that came before this moment; it celebrates a journey of blood, sweat, and tears, that feels endless when tackled head first, and oddly fleeting when viewed in hindsight.

Despite all the bumps in my path to dentistry, I probably wouldn't have it any other way. When I try to count every opportunity that God has opened in my life, I'm always overwhelmed. I am grateful because everything has led me here, and I am so excited for what the future holds. Even if means a being a zombie, being sleep-deprived, and spending endless hours studying for anatomy, my other classes, and practicing lab things - I'm ready :)

A typical week in med school

When I was applying to med schools, I was always curious about what a typical school day would be like. Now that I'm in my fourth week (time flies!), I thought it'd be fun to show what a week at USC is like.

Here is my schedule for last week:

Seems pretty confusing right? We don't even really have a "typical week." Almost every week is different (like this week we had a practice exam). I miss the days of having a predictable school schedule...sigh.

So everyday we have anywhere from 1 to 4 hours of classroom lecture (usually 4), and then a 2-4 hr session - either PPM, ICM, or Anatomy lab.

[acronym explanation time]
PPM = Professionalism and the Practice of Medicine
    - Ethics, humanities, touchy-feely stuff, ya know
ICM = Introduction to Clinical Medicine
    - Tuesday mornings are spent in the hospital (almost every week)
    - Thursday afternoons are "workshops" where we learn the skills we apply on Tuesdays (only some weeks)

the blog comes back to life

"brains?"

photo source

To our scant and apathetic readers,

After a lengthy hibernation, this blog is coming back to life! Now that I am finally starting med school, I want to share my experiences. Updates may be short or inconsistent, but I'll try my best! I started school exactly 2 weeks ago and basically dove right in. Between classes, studying, and socials, I've already become dependent on daily coffee to keep me awake. The challenging part about medical school is not difficult concepts, but just the sheer amount of material we must learn. So the best advice I heard was to "hit the ground running." Of course we must also balance this advice with "don't forgot to have fun!" Will I succeed, or be a floundering failure? Stay tuned to find out! 

the highly anticipated white coat

<3 kathleen

Making the most of your AMCAS: a friendly guide

So you’re done with your MCAT, finishing up your personal statement, and securing your letters of recommendation. After all that, the AMCAS application probably seems like a piece of cake! But be careful not to rest on your laurels! Because besides your personal statement, the “Work/Activities” section of the AMCAS is the only other place to make yourself shine! Before we get there, let’s go through a brief overview of the application.

AMCAS: your best friend for the next few months.

1. Identifying Information.

Pretty straightforward. The easiest part!

2. Schools Attended.

High school and colleges. This includes community college, even if you only took 1 or 2 classes there during high school.

3. Biographic Information

Tip: It’s okay (and probably better) to use your preferred address for the “permanent address” as well. Some schools have a policy of mailing things only to the “permanent address” entered in your AMCAS. The address doesn’t affect your background check or anything important like that, so just put where you want stuff mailed.

My New Job, and a Glimpse into Esthetic Dentistry

In the past month, I started working at a dental lab where dental work - crowns, implants, veneers, bridges, etc. - is fabricated so dentists can place them in patient's mouths.

I'm not doing any of the CDT (ceramic dental technician) stuff just yet (though I get to start wax-ups next week! hooray!!), but I've been helping my boss work on a presentation for these big esthetic dentistry conferences in Germany and Poland. It's great, because I get to help design his presentation and the yearbook nerd in me is certainly rejoicing. I've been using (and trying to get better at) Photoshop and Illustrator.. Now if I could just figure out Lightroom..

As I've been helping him prep, I've begun to learn a lot about the ideas behind esthetic dentistry as well (I'll be spelling esthetic with an "e", so if that bothers you, I'm sorry.. lol). Dental students always tell me that school whizzes by you in a flash, and that when they get out of school, they barely feel ready to take on real patients, in a real practice. I've always wondered if there's enough time to develop a trained hand for the detailed work in dental school, and whether the curriculum trains your eye for esthetically pleasing work. Since my boss is a CDT, he focuses heavily on the artistic component of dentistry, and tells me that often times, dentists aren't even aware when there's an esthetic issue with the labwork because they haven't learned how to see these problems yet.

Pre-med and bioengineering: my perspective

Being a bioengineering major and pre-med at Berkeley has been quite the interesting ride. Although I loved my major, it definitely wasn’t the easiest path to med school, and I have many mixed feelings about it. I was recently asked to answer some questions for an event for BioE pre-meds. If you’re pre-med and considering an engineering major, I hope you’ll find these questions helpful!

1. How/when did you decide to pursue both bioengineering and medicine?

I entered college as Undeclared in the College of Engineering, and was only considering medicine a little bit. I was interested in medical devices, so I narrowed my major down to mechanical engineering or bioengineering. I finally chose bioengineering when I realized how dry everything seemed to me when it didn’t have a biological or medical application. Then, by the end of my sophomore year, I realized that my heart really pulled me toward medicine. I sought experiences to expose me to the field of medicine, and that how I became a BioE pre-med!

2. What did you enjoy most about your major (and being pre-med)?

Bioengineering is such a broad discipline. There is a lot of room for designing your own curriculum to get you where you want to go. Since I knew I wanted to pursue medicine, I chose more classes that were geared towards biology/medicine and less tech-heavy classes. I enjoyed my engineering classes because they were either very conceptual with little memorization, or they were focused on new technologies with direct clinical applications.

Interview Tips

For the 2012-2013 cycle, I got 9 interview invites and attended 5 of them (UoP, Michigan, NYU, UPenn, UCLA).

Now that interviews are completely, 100%, glorifyingly over, I'm proud to say I was 5 for 5 interviews, aka I got accepted anywhere I interviewed! woot.

I would attribute my success to three factors, and I'll list them for you below (Interview Prep Checklist below as well!).

1. Being genuine.

• On my UCLA interview, they asked me what I'd been doing over my gap year. I started listing being like, "It's been a pretty busy year.. I have several part time jobs as a dental assistant, teacher, tutor...and a waitress.. to make rent by the end of the month.. haha" At that, both my interviewers jumped at my sheepish last response, and said "Being a server is probably one of the most valuable experiences you coulda gotten out of all the jobs you listed. Being in a service position blah blah blah" etc. They knew that being a server doesn't sound fancy, but the life experience is invaluable.