Well, I successfully completed my first week of medical school. It's not what I expected, but this isn't a bad thing. I expected that we would dive into the basic medical sciences but this wasn't the case. This first week has been about teaching us HOW to be medical students. To be sure, we've had some didactic lectures, mainly in DOCS (Developing Osteopathic Clinical Skills), but most of the week has been devoted to teaching us effective study skills, professional identity formation, and what resources are avaliable to us as student doctors. Many of us also met our upper classmen 'siblings'; mine is an SNMA (Student National Medical Association) member and an OMS-II. Though he's more than a decade younger than me, we share some traits and I think that we'll get along well. I was also given the option of joining a study group with two other students, one of whom is an Air Force veteran. I haven't fully decided if I want to use a study group or not but I will call these guys this weekend to see where their heads are at.
We signed up for the EMT-Basic class and even those of us who are currently licensed as EMTs, RNs, PAs, or some other health provider, have to take the class. Its all good though. It'll count as CEUs and it'll be a nice skills refresher. Once the EMT class has concluded, we'll start early clinical experiences, depending on where we are at with the COVID-19 epidemic. Right now, the positivity rate in San Antonio is doubling every couple of days and while most everyone on campus is masking up, there exists a possibility that we could move to online learning and the early clinical exposure could be canceled. If the clinicals aren't cancelled,we'll be tasked with doing ride-alongs with San Antonio Fire EMS, shadowing/working in school health clinics, doing street medicine with the UIWSOM mobile clinic, and shadowing in local primary care offices. They also told us that they are working on an MOU with a local section 8 housing development to have UIWSOM students, UIW nursing, pharmacy, optometry, and PT students to provide health and social services to the residents. Looking forward to all of this.
I've got two quizzes to complete tomorrow and I'll also start working on my EMT modules (They are taught by RC Health in case anyone reading this wants to complete an online EMT course). Other than that, I'll spend the weekend getting ready for next week. They will be introducing a little more content to us so I'll have a little more reading to do. Tomorrow, I'll post about how we conduct the case based learning in our SIGS class.
