on the advice of a fellow classmate, i sent out a class-wide email appealing for the return of these books soon so i could get started on this stupid reading course. i got one legit reply. but it was from one of my friends, and i'll be able to pick the books up tonight. score, right? well i still need to go to the course office and pick up the exam and evaluation form. but i figured, hey, since i did the footwork to find the books i should be able to keep this set, right?

WRONG! the lady tells me that since i'm #2 on the list, if i bring in the books then they go to whoever's #1. normally that sounds fair except that #1 isn't trying to get the books themselves. there's no incentive for me to rush these books in, then, since i don't get to keep them.

so i may have implied that maybe i wouldn't bother going to get these books since i'd just be turning them over, and maybe i'll just wait until i find 2 sets before coming in. after some discussion, the lovely ladies at the course office agreed that if i bring in a set of books, i can use them. aww. THANKS YOU GUYS ARE THE BEST. gotta love it.

this educational lesson brought to you by dr. j around 10:56 AM |

currently i'm taking this independent reading course on international health. it's 2 weeks long, counts for 2 credits, and requires 0 hours of class time and a purported 40-50 hours of self-directed learning and reading. sounds like a vacation right? what you do is you call up the course director (because they won't contact you) and tell them you're taking the course, then you come in and pick up a stack of books and a multiple choice exam, and turn the whole mess in 2 weeks later.

that's what's supposed to happen.

the course was slated to start yesterday. i spoke with the course director's assistant (because the director herself sounded on the verge of severe illness) and they said they have no books currently, because the last crop of kids hasn't turned their books in yet. so i'm on a waiting list. for course materials. ridiculous! they say they have "absolutely no control" over when the students turn the books in. so they said it's possible it could take a day to a few weeks. A FEW WEEKS! i'll be full-fledged into another rotation if that happens.

they don't really care when you turn this shit in, so the lady said that i could pick these up in february and turn it all in in march, that's okay. but i was hoping to throttle through this shit quickly before my "real" rotations start so i won't have to even think about it later.

ugh. i'm just upset because someone got to the washers and dryers before i did this morning, so i've been waiting.

this educational lesson brought to you by dr. j around 11:16 AM |

honestly, not much more to see at flickr..

trying to recap the past week...

monday: can't remember. must not have been very exciting. i'm sure matt and i watched the office DVDs again.

tuesday: interviewed for preliminary medicine at SUNY downstate. a lot of foreign and carribbean grads, which makes conversation a bit uneasy and awkward if you arrive too early. i arrived too early. plus side: one of the students i rotated with at sinai was there, so we had fun catching up with each other while everyone else asked the residents questions about the program. i just kind of lost interest midway through the morning. the interview itself was pretty lame. about 10 minutes long, with the doc repeatedly saying "i guess we'll see you on july 1st". he said it at least 3 or 4 times. i told him "see you then." i'm pretty sure neither of us believed the other. that night i had dinner at frankie's 457 in carroll gardens and it was delicious but it got cold that night.

wednesday: interviewed for anesthesia at mt. sinai. i rotated there last october, so i had some idea of what to expect. out of 8 other interviewees, 2 were sinai students, 2 had rotated with me, and 1 had rotated earlier. counting me, that makes 75% of the interviewees. everyone and their mama wants to come to this program it seems. and i loved it while i was there. although to be honest, it didn't feel as much as "home" as i thought it would. and i certainly didn't walk out of there feeling as good about it as i did at NYU. and i didn't get such a "good to see you again" vibe as i was hoping for. i'm sure they're used to students fighting tooth and nail to get in... so score one more for NYU so far. that evening, rodbard and i went to MSG and took in a knicks game and it was awesome. i'd definitely go to lots of games if i match into residency here, since its just a 30-40min subway ride away. we sat in the nosebleed, and the knicks blew a 20 point lead, but they still pulled it out and beat the mavericks in overtime. it was a good game. then we came home and watched the replay on MSGtv. seriously.

thursday: interviewed for preliminary medicine at new york downtown hospital in chinatown. what i knew about the program beforehand was minimal, except that their housing is awesome (in terms of price and location, maybe not necessarily in terms of size and quality). the hospital is a workhorse. 6 days a week, nearly every week. we were told not to expect much time off. the program director was abrasive, arrogant, and challenged us to defend why we applied for transitional years. homeboy was defensive as hell. my interview was equally bad, consisting of a doctor complaining about how stupid his med students were when he was a fellow and he had to teach them, and how much he hated stooping to their level to get them to understand. on the plus side, you can pay $400 for a studio apartment in chinatown. that evening i trekked to the upper west side to have dinner at Rain, a fancy shmancy thai restaurant. the bill was footed by the columbia anesthesiology dept, and the handful of residents that i got to speak with that were seated near my corner of the table were all very friendly and pretty fun to hang with. definitely a good impression of the program.

friday: interviewed for anesthesia at columbia university waaaaaay up in washington heights. about an hour on the subway to get there. i liked the program immediately. it really reminds me a lot of wisconsin's program, in terms of the hospital environment and the resident-to-faculty culture, and the overall gut feeling that i had of the program. the interviews went very well (one was with the program director), except that one of my interviewers called in sick, so my substitute was unprepared (hadn't read my file) and was being rushed through the interview because he had other scheduled interviews to conduct. still, considering the situation, i came out of there with a very good feeling. that night i got very drunk in the lower east side.

saturday: nursed a hangover all day. got very nauseous later that afternoon. slept a lot. decided to go out to union square that evening after it got really really really fucking cold and shitty and hailing. that was a bad idea. had some drinks at the coffee shop bar or something. the plantain chips with black bean dip were to die for, but good lord was it cold out.

sunday: aka today. wrote some thank you notes. listened to a lot of hot chip. i've been listening to a LOT of hot chip lately. good shit, hot chip. helped tamar make a spinach and mushroom lasagna, then we made a strawberry trifle cake, which i will eat all of within the next day if they let me. then we watched intervention. and now i'm going to try to finish sputnik sweetheart and go to bed.

goodnight.

this educational lesson brought to you by dr. j around 11:35 PM |

more at flickr

last night the cook sisters accompanied us to a neighborhood bar called brooklyn social for some cocktails and conversation. i had a drink called the "fellini." it came with a sprig of mint.

today we went to bar tabac for a delicious sunday brunch (i had the eggs benedict norvegiene, an excellent take on eggs benny with salmon; bard and i split an order of merguez, a spicy lamb sausage - also awesome) with an entire cast of characters of tamar's buddies n' pals. then matt and i watched the office for hours and hours. tamar did some sewing on her new machine.

tonight we had a very tasty homemade dinner of butternut squash soup with roasted red pepper puree, asparagus, and turkey sausage.

that is all. like i said, lazy sunday.

this educational lesson brought to you by dr. j around 10:33 PM |

last night lisa mumm had a party and she brought out pictures of us from CMJ 2000(?) and we laughed and drank sparks and talked about madison and brian stanger. she had a lot of nice party treats like melba toast and goat cheese and vegetarian eggplant caviar and homemade pickled string beans and asparagus and also there was a candy bowl filled with little toblerones and gelt and a couple of cold-eeze. oh, mumm was also late to her own party (we got there before she did). totes mumm.

also jeff o'neill and his girlfriend were there and i found out that she went to madison too and she's from rice lake and went to high school with my friend andy's wife. true story. also two other people i've never met before who also went to madison were there. one guy was pretty sure we had met before. he didn't look familiar. then tamar told us all about our horoscopes and we learned that leos are the best.

got home around 2:30ish, woke up around 5:30ish for my interview today at st. luke's-roosevelt for a prelim. i felt nauseous pretty much the whole day and got little relief from the continental breakfast. the interviews went over really well though. one interviewer was a korean doc and we joked around about being raised in typical asian households, taking classical piano lessons, learning golf, etc. hopefully my chances are strong there - while the program isn't anything incredible, the location is nice and the subsidized housing is a big plus.

whatever. i'm home now. rodbard was listening to "i just called to say i love you" and tamar's at the gym. i'm going to take a nap. i hear kara's in town. WELL I GUESS WE'LL SEE ABOUT THAT NOW WON'T WE.

this educational lesson brought to you by dr. j around 1:27 PM |

i interviewed at NYU today and it was awesome. for those of you that have been following along, last fall i rotated at NYU and mt. sinai, and it's basically going to be a toss-up between those two hospitals for my #1 and #2 spots on my rank list. the part that causes me anxiety is if i'm going to end up being anywhere on either of those two hospital's rank lists (i.e., if they rank me at #35 or something, the likelihood of me getting in is nil). so next week i interview at sinai but today was NYU and i was determined to make an impression and secure my spot there.

and i honestly feel like it worked. i interviewed today with the program director and associate program director, and both interviews went really well. we talked about the band, about why i'd like to move to nyc, about how important it is to rotate at the hospital i'm interviewing at (the PD mentioned that he woudl feel more comfortable ranking an applicant such as myself that has spent time at the hospital already, versus a complete stranger. not to say that it guarantees me anything either way, but that it does play somewhat of a role). also, both interviewers mentioned several times that i'd fit in well and be a "perfect fit" for them at NYU, and i kept that train of thought going and told them that i would really love to come to the program and would be hard-pressed to find a better one (it's true.. and if there is a better one, i'm pretty sure it must be sinai... but i guess we'll see).

the kicker was when the PD very off-handedly mentioned that if i ranked them #1 then it shouldn't be a problem for me to match there. since it's kinda sorta not-kosher to discuss these "where would you rank us" sort of things, i merely said that it would be very difficult for me to consider them as anything less (i think that dances around the issue enough while still making it obvious), and that i would LOVE to come there (and i really would).

anyway, i left the interview feeling great about things and hopefully this confidence can carry me through so i can perform equally well at sinai. and then we'll see who gets the top spot on my list, and who lets me in on theirs.

so why do i like NYU so much? after all, sinai is the big popular residency-advocacy program in NYC (which is why i contacted them about an away rotation first). some reasons:
1) a more diverse residency class, not just in terms of ethnicity but also in geography. i met kids from miami, chicago, california, etc. seemed to have a broader representation than sinai (based on my limited observations).
2) a more diverse caseload/patient population. bottom line, these guys see trauma all the time at bellevue. sinai residents only see trauma at elmhurst, which is an away rotation for like one month a yr or something.
3) more diverse environments. NYU has 3 hospitals you rotate through: bellevue, the big city hospital that also functions as a level 1 trauma center, academic teaching HQ, and is known to be "resident run." they also feature team captain call, which means as a CA-3, you run the show on a call night as a junior attending, essentially. Tisch is the bigger private hospital, and hospital for joint surgery does a lot of outpatient ortho cases, which allows for a lot of regional techniques.
4) better location. bellevue is at 28th and 1st ave. tisch is at 33rd and 1st. and HJD is 17th and 2nd or something like that. sinai is 100th and madison. nice view of central park up there, and a nice safe upper east side neighborhood, but kinda bo-o-o-oring, if you ask me. expensive wives walking alongside expensive nannies pushing their expensive children in expensive strollers, drinking starbucks.
5) better $$$. cuz that's what it all bout anyway, shit. love and education never bought no rims.

this educational lesson brought to you by dr. j around 5:20 PM |

new york city? get a rope.

rob picked me up in beloit, bags and all, and we went to chicago and bought sparks and vodka (not originally intending to mix the two later in the night), and met up the chicagoans at the new china buffet. the food was aiight. the mac and cheese was mediocre. and i never saw the pizza until we were leaving, well after i had developed an unfounded obsession with finding it. also tjk got called in to do a liver transplant and none of us thought we'd see him again until next year.

after dinner, rob and soup and i (aka the beloiters) went to jim wakefield's new year's eve party, which was themed "bad porn." (see top photo.) grape soda karl had an amazing moustache. seriously. i'm pretty sure we talked about it for the bulk of our short stay at the party. we had to make a quick escape because 1) rob was arguing anti-union viewpoints with union organizers (probably a bad idea) and 2) we had another party to get to. soup and i finished a sparks, rob drank his vodka-sparks cocktail, and this other guy talked to me very LOUDLY about how he liked to make a drink called the "sparkplug" which sounded overly complicated and totally not his own creation.

we finally got to doc dayne's a bit after 11pm, where we quickly learned that we were not the only revelers who thought to pick up the $9 six-pack of sparks that were all over the city. we watched the ball drop on tv (totally anticlimactic) and danced to whatever was playing on the ipods. somewhere along the course of the night, the girls started doing backbends and other yoga moves on the dancefloor aka dan's very nice rug. also there were pull-ups. and also i would like to make a special mention of the delicious cheesecake things that virginia made, that were excellent and probably fattening.

i think there may have been about 10 of us piled into a minivan cab after the party. minivans are not supposed to hold 10 people.

the next morning, zaid and amelia (who had the foresight to stock up on breakfast supplies the evening before), provided us with a make-it-yo-damn-self post-new-year's brunch. it really was great. we had omelettes and bagels and fruit and coffee and juice and potatoes and chocolate and pistachios. then we watched the packers beat the seahawk's second string, which would have been a bit unfulfilling if i had cared. i remember favre waving to the crowd at the end of the game, as if to say "thanks for the memories, now i'm retiring." even though he hasn't said that yet.

lazy sunday (not that lazy sunday) continued, we attempted to go see a movie but parking was nuts and the line for the box office was nuts, so we went to blockbuster and rented this and disc one of this and then we also rented this atrocity, which was selected for its incredibly stupid packaging and the fact that it was in the "horror" section. we figured it'd be good for a few laughs. (it wasn't. we fast forwarded through a large portion of the movie and suddenly were faced with the closing credits. we should have expected as much from a horror movie about genetically altered crops. or something.)

i woke up monday morning, took the blue line to o'hare, met up with fellow beloiter amanda for breakfast at wolfgang puck's chateau d'prices exorbitant in the B gate pavilion (my flight was at 9am, hers was at 10am.. we totally planned to meet up, it wasn't random). i paid $5 for a bottled water and a thing of yogurt. then i flew back to new york city, had an interview at st. vincent's yesterday for prelim/transitional (it looks to be a great program, i'm going to rank it very highly, plus it's located in greenwich village), and went to TING HUA for dinner last night.

today i've got off of interviews (tomorrow is NYU) and so does rodbard. so we're going to try to do the double-dip and watch 2 movies for the price of one downtown. one of them may or may not be the ringer. the other one might be munich.

i sympathize with the miners' families in west virgnia, but according to CNN, nothing else has happened in the world for the past 2 hours.

this educational lesson brought to you by dr. j around 11:16 AM |