blog post

This is a blog post. it is about blog posts. and labels

Holidays

Holidays!

Since I last wrote, there's been a week of class, a test, an assignment, a family dinner and some holiday time.

The last week of classes wasn't too bad. The new chemistry topic (Kinetics) bores me to death! but I guess it's important in relation to drug effects etc so I'm trying to take it in. It is hard, however, to drag myself out of bed in the morning knowing that I'm trading an extra hours sleep for an hour of rates of reactions.

I did the embryology lab for BioSci 107. it was pretty fun - the lab exercise is to create an model embryo out of modelling clay. the model is marked on relative size and arrangement of the embryo's structures (namely blood vessels, gut derivatives and neural tisue). turns out it's reasonably difficult to make an accurately shaped neural tube - they look like little dinosaurs :)

also had chem lab - determining the alcohol content in wine. That was pretty cool. kind of interesting set up having a sandbath to heat the wine. I think because sand is a shitty conductor it stopped the wine from heating up faster than the thermometer could read? so that we didn't boil out a bunch of the water content as well as the ethanol? Maybe. Our red wine had an alcohol content of 10.7% according to our calculations. (Here's hoping that's actually right)....another pair near us got 10.6% though so we were possibly on the right track.

I love easter. I just thought I'd add that in. I'm eating those mini easter eggs with the yum chocolate truffle ganache stuff inside for dinner. they are amazing.

So much for chronological continuity...Anyway, what else? The assignment! Poplhlth 101 - Health systems and the NZ health reform. The assignment itself i didn't struggle with too much. we were given all the readings we were allowed to use so there wasn't the usual battle with Scopus (that's a science journal database for those who don't know) to take up the first weeks of working on it. The questions were all pretty straightforward - define this, compare and contrast these, discuss that. Reasonable word limit. had to cut down to meet it, but not by too much. The only real issue I had with it was that the biggest question (a 1200 word mini-essay) was based primarily on two papers by former NZ minister of health Annette King......and my lord are they drivel. *disclaimer*in my opinion*disclaimer*  it's basically 70 pages of "we have this problem and that problem so we're going to try a new thing....but we're not going to tell you exactly how the new thing will work or how we thing it will help...we're just banking on the fact that the world will get better if we change something". what a pain in the ass to read through.But the assignment got handed in and all that jazz. Will hopefully get it back in the first week of next term.

The other exciting thing that happened was the Pophlth 111 test. It was supposed to be the hardest test of the year - out of all the papers. the tutor told us outright that it is specifically designed to weed people out. last year, everyone did so badly that they instigated plussage to make up for how hard it was.

So I studied reasonably hard for it.Lots of practice questions. and I thought it was....ohhkayyyy. i got most of the answers outright. there were 6 questions out of 30 that I wasn't sold on first time through so I went through again and nutted those ones out. all There is now is fingers crossed that the marks come back alright. So i'm not going to agonise over it. No...i'm not....

Since then, I've been on holiday :)

lazing mostly. haven't studied enough. but i shall get onto that this week. 

Hope everyone's holidays are going well! happy easter!

Week 3.

I'm siiiick!!!!!!!

I've had a cold all week and I am not at all impressed. I believe I caught it off a friend who is inhabiting my spare room at the moment, which is understandable - small spaces are contagion's best friend.

My sinuses are about to explode, my throat is dead and the bits where my tonsils used to be are all swollen! I thought a tonsillectomy meant you wouldn't get sick in your tonsil region any more!!! (I was wrong).

and the boyfriend has gone to work and there's no one to look after me! *sob*

It's weird having people staying with us. two friends of ours, a couple, have been here for  a week so far. they leave next weekend when their new flat becomes available. It's nice to have them here at the moment, but I definitely wouldn't have flatmates again permanently if I had the choice. There's too much stuff everywhere - not enough space to put all the belongings of four people. and I can't go to the bathroom naked, even in the middle of the night. 

Uni this week has been pretty good. we covered experimental embryology in Bio 107, which I thought was really interesting. A lot of people really dislike the lecturer for the topic but I don't really know why. I think maybe because these professors would really rather be doing their own research than teaching the basics to over-eager first years, and so, aren't quite as enthusiastic as the twenty and thirty-something secondary teachers whose main goal is to make learning happen for a bunch of painful teenagers. These first years will get used to it over the next three years, when every lecturer they have is exactly the same :P

The tutorials I have been going to have been great. We did a reasonably in depth session on the Poplhlth 101 assignment that's due in a week and a bit, which was good. I have to buckle down and finish that today. I've only got a bit to go though. Maybe 700 more words for content, then just tidying the whole lot up, referencing etc. etc.

I bought myself a mascot toy from the uni bookshop this week. His name is Safety Boy. The pic is pretty much what he looks like only he is the red one and he has black shorts. Also one of the beads for his eyes is bigger than the other so it looks like he's a little crazy...or maybe has a black eye, the poor thing. So cute. I love his little broken arm. There are more characters and they are awesomesauce.

So week 4 starts this week and guess what.. the week after is the last week of term! how insanely quick has that been? mind you, it is a very short term.. and next term will be two weeks longer. Damn them moveable feasts (that is to say, easter is early this year and they don't like to give us too many holidays, so term break is also happening early).

One last thing: I think I'm going to start up martial arts again. My friends neighbour runs a club at the uni. I went on friday and did some sparring and stuff. It was good fun.

Alright, must go and be productive. 

ciao 

Week 2: The fun goes on

This week went so insanely quickly.. yesterday felt like it should have been a Wednesday not a Friday.

I've had crazily long days all week though. Monday was regular class starting at 8 and study study study all the way up to the 6-9pm population health tutorial that evening.

Chem tutorial didn't finish until 9:30 on Tuesday and Thursday's Bio tut went on until closer to 10pm. 

Wednesday was my easy day, but a mate of mine has had some immigration shit going down, so I ended up staying at his until sometime after 3am. So no early night for me. But that's all good :). Watched Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, which was mildly amusing. not a feat of cimenatography by any stretch of the imagination, but it was fun to laugh at. Later on we watched the Hurt Locker (this years Best Picture at the oscars, as well as best director and 4 others). I really enjoyed it :D. thought it was very sensitively done and definitely recommend seeing it.

Incidentally torrentfreak.com tells me that the movie has been online for over a year and has now been downloaded 10 million times total, with most of those downloads occurring in the week since the Oscars.

Just in case you were wondering about that...

The first tut I had was amazing - pophlth 111. it was so intense. We covered types of epidemiological study, how to interpret them, etcetc. Then the tutor took us through what sort of questions will be asked in the first test. By all accounts the first test is going to be ridiculously hard. This is a scary thought because the content is all pretty easy to get to grips with.. WHAT ARE THEY GOING TO ASK???? how am I going to know if I got the answers right?!? What if I'm totally misguided and actually don't understand the topic at all??

Then what? that's 20% down the drain..... *worryworryworry*

The other two tutorials were less awesome, mostly because the stuff we're doing in bio and chem right now is all old material. chem is the same as 7th form (not even kidding one little bit - we learnt what a double bond was and how to tell cis and trans isomers apart). 

And bio is..well, bio. lots of words to learn and remember in a short period of time and lots of definitions to know. Fortunately once you know them, it's super easy. George likes to remember things.

Classes this week have been pretty much as I just described. My other class, Health Systems, has been disrupted by the terrible bus service that's supposed to take us from city campus to tamaki (25 mins away). so far we have had four lectures and I have only arrived at ONE of them on time, because there aren't enough buses or the buses are late or the buses crash... and so on and so forth. the content is alright. not particularly ground-breaking, but relevant enough to want I want to do that it holds my attention.

I have to tidy my flat today. I should get up and start cleaning.

Fun times.

 - G

Radio Lollipop

I have just sent off for information on how to train to become a volunteer with a programme called Radio Lollipop. The programme, which runs in the UK, North America, Australia, as well as here in New Zealand, consists of volunteers who visit children in hospital with the aim of making their stay just a little bit more fun. There is also a radio station broadcast to the children's wards (I imagine it will be heard throughout Starship here) playing kids songs, nursery rhymes etc; which makes some sense of the programme's name.

So hopefully I hear back from them soonish. It sounds like a pretty awesome thing to be involved with :)

 - G
//EDIT//  The march intake is full so I'll be going to the July info evening. It's on Thursday the 15th of July. Must not forget :)

Week 1 - I think we made it

I made it through week one!!!!!!!!

Here's a run-down of my initial thoughts on my courses this semester:

 - Biosci 107 - Cellular Processes and Development
I think this course is going to be reasonably straightforward. All rote learning (which is perfect for me :D I win at remembering things). We've covered embryonic development from conception to week 3 in overview form, later on we do up to week 4 in way more detail which will be interesting. I've heard it puts a girl off having kids for a while :P.
Right now we are going over cell and tissue types. we've learnt about epithelia and connective tissue. It's been good to refresh the names, structures and functions of this stuff I learnt way back when.

The lecturer is bizarre! he speaks really quickly, but half of what he says is "And you're listening to this, and now you're writing it down and you're going to remember it for the exam" or "I've written some things on the slide for you to read and you'll read them and takes some notes about them"......... My hope is that by the power of suggestion I might just remember those things he wrote on the slide when I'm in the exam in 13 weeks time.

 - Chem 110 - Organic Chemistry
Lectures for chem have been bring as hell, but the lecturer has suggested that this first week should just be revision for most people. It's probably good, seeing as I haven't done chemistry in three years, to recap this stuff - functional group structures, naming conventions etc. Once I've been over it this weekend, I think I should be up to speed with everything I need to know.
The lab this week was reasonably cool. Chromotographic extraction of leaf components. from the tutor's feedback I understand that my burette set-up was "excellent" and my carotene sample was sufficiently yellow :). I got a good lab partner too - a first year who knows that we can't afford to be on autopilot for even one moment this year if we seriously want to get in to medicine.

 - Poplhlth 101 - Health Systems
The lecturer for this paper tells us that PopHealth 101 is the most important course we will ever take. She said that this is true for absolutely everyone regardless of whether or not they go on to become health proffesionals, which I think is probably a bit of a tough call... not entirely sure that learning how health systems work will be exceedingly relevant to absolutely everyone, but each to his own, I guess. I am really enjoying the course so far though :). Yesterday we were asked to construct a diagram of the system we would implement to manage chronic asthma if we were the Minister of health. T'was a really interesting exercise! lots and lots of things to think about. I'll scan my diagram in (because sooo many people are interested in how I think we should manage asthma >.< lol).

 - Poplhlth 111 - Population Health
This course scares me. This is the course that trips everyone up in OLY1. From what I have heard, even people who get all A+s only manage to get A- in PopHealth111. I'm going to a tutoring session on Monday for this one and hopefully I'll be able to get my head around how the assessments work and things like that.
We are currently learning about epidemiology. Nothing new - just standard research practice applied to   health-related topics. I'm worried though because apparently the tests (multi-choice questions) have the most ambiguous answers imaginable. We shall see :S

Other things: There are some cool people in my classes who I am getting to know. It's really nice having a prescribed course so everyone is pretty much doing all the same things.
I lost a kg this week.... must remember to eat as well as study!!!!!!!!
For one course - Poplhlth 101 - we have to go to tamaki campus on the bus, except there are 1000 odd people all going at the same time so they don't have enough buses. Had to wait for half an hour yesterday for the bus to come back and get us. Didn't miss too much of the lecture though, so that's alright.

Okay, must go have lunch and go over that chem stuff. Fun times :)
 - G

My first day of school

So today was the first day of term. I started at 8am with a chemistry lecture - fun times.This was followed by a biology lecture. After this was a lunch break and a population health lecture. I ended the day with a 3 hour biology lab.
I was going to say that the day went really quickly, but I slept through my lunch break so I guess that'd explain it.

So about today: lectures were terribly boring - covering only admin stuff for the whole time.How lecturers can fill an entire hour solely with "Your test is on this date", "You must attend labs" and "Please don't cheat" is beyond me....
Lab, on the other hand, was reasonably fun. My lab partner is nice. And is a graduate like me, so that couldn't have worked out better. Honestly, even before we've learnt anything, the straight-out-of-high-school i'm-gonna-be-a-brain-surgeon pre meds are as precocious as I knew a person could be. it's mildly sickening, but it's alright because I am well aware that a quarter of those will give up on the med-school dream before the year is out and an overwhelming majority of the rest will simply not do well enough to get through to next year.

So that was today. check in again tomorrow ;)
 -G

Welcome to the new year

This year. Pre-med. BHSc first year, or OLY1 as they call it here at the University of Auckland.


Eight courses:


Semester 1:
PopHlth 101 Health Systems 
PopHlth 111 Population Health
Chem 110 Chemistry of the Living World
Biosci 107 Biomedical Science 


Semester 2:
PopHlth 102 Health and Society
HlthPsy 122 Behaviour, Health and Development
YouthWrk 152G New Zealand Youth
Medsci 142 Biomedical Science


Classes start on the 1st of March.  Four 8am starts a weeks in semester 1.
Not bad. I do not mind at all the *idea* of waking up early and getting a head start on the day. I'm pretty sure I won't feel that way when I'm struggling my way out of bed each morning. Time will tell. 


Perhaps I should start getting up earlier before then. I might get some melatonin supplements to shift my body clock.
I'll type up my study plan sometime soon.


ciao