And so it begins

Med school starts for real on Monday!!  I already have reading to do and paper to write over the weekend!  The past 3 weeks we have had various orientation activities.  First we had 2 weeks of military orientation, and by "2 weeks" I mean 4 half days and 1 full day.  Even calling some days half days is generous.  One day we were done by 9am.  I am definitely not complaining about having so much free time, I just wish I was able to make more use of it.  My husband and I just bought a house (more on that later) but I wasn't able to move in during orientation due to the lengthy closing process.   But I digress.  Back to orientation.  Some things were definitely useful, such as learning where things are located on base.  A lot of things were just checking in with various offices- medical, dental, security, etc.  Some briefs were verbatim repeats of things we had at ODS.  The JAGs sure love showing this scene from A Few Good Men.  Probably the most useful part of orientation was getting to know my classmates.  At the end of the first week of orientation we met our "fire teams" - a group of 4 people we will be working closely with throughout medical school.  We spent the day working with our fire teams on team building activities and a scavenger hunt.  At a BBQ a few days later, I introduced myself to someone on my fire team.  Ooops!  I am still working on putting faces with names.  Thank goodness for name tags!

This past week we had academic orientation, where we were briefed on an overview of the curriculum.  We had lots of quirky professors and second year students giving us tips for success through medical school.

According to this flow chart I should go into family medicine...

Most importantly, this week we were issued books and doctor tools!  They told us that our stack of 36 books weighed in around 147 pounds!  It was quite a feat getting those into the car.  I would like to thank you, the tax payer, for buying these books!  I can't even imagine how much it would have cost to buy everything.  The fact that they told us to add our doctor tools to our insurance policy gives me some idea!

My books are almost as tall as me!

Still trying to figure out what I use all this for...

A closer look at the hefty stack