...Will probably end up on the grossing bench!
Academic updates:
At this point in the semester we have been reading our CAP Cancer Protocols for about a month. We’ve been covering benign and malignant physiologic processes for a while now for several different organs and systems and are now learning about diseases of white blood cells, lymph nodes, spleen, and the thymus in our disease mechanisms class. Many big themes around physiology and how the body adapts to stress have begun to reveal themselves, as well as patterns around how cancer is assessed by pathologists and pathologist’s assistants alike.
Since our anatomy class is just that, an anatomy class, it doesn’t go into detail about physiology, which sometimes makes it more challenging to learn the material. Almost everything in the human body is formed around the function it has, and so learning physiology is often taught side-by-side with anatomy. It feels like our pathology-specific classes have been filling this void nicely. We learn about normal structures in anatomy, and then our pathology classes cover the 1 million ways things can go awry with those structures.
Is the amount of content overwhelming? Absolutely. Do I cry often? Affirmative. But what doesn’t kill you ends up making you a better pathologist’s assistant.
Other notes from the second half of this semester:
Travel:
Traveling to and from Morgantown can be challenging. When I moved here, my flight plans were canceled twice. I ended up flying into Pittsburgh at midnight, sleeping for 4 hours and then catching a bus to Morgantown. SO, now that we are coming up on the last leg of this semester, travel plans have come to the forefront of many people’s minds, which means the Finals schedule is at the forefront of people’s minds. Professors have been understanding about students having a desire to have finals on certain days or earlier in the week. They have also been careful, however, not to make any changes unless the cohort is in unanimous agreement about it. In February I had to operate on the assumption that we would have a final on the Friday of finals week in order to make my travel arrangements (this ended up not being the case due to rescheduling). Other people are going the strategy route, trying to see when the last exam day is so that they can buy their tickets to optimize time with family and cost-effectiveness. In my past academic experiences, the finals schedule was already set at the beginning of the term and was never changed, so this was a slightly more chaotic experience. Something to keep in mind for anyone in future cohorts. With all that in mind, everyone knew coming into this that we were sacrificing seeing our families as often as we might like, it’s simply a reality of taking a more challenging route academically and professionally.
Volunteer work:
Due to the fact that my classmates are awesome, diligent, people, many of them have already started accumulating volunteer hours. Some examples of how people are volunteering:
Support staff at youth sporting events
Animal shelters, especially taking care of the cats
Trail clean-ups
Taking part in research studies.
I’m also planning on volunteering at a local shelter, hopefully in the kitchen, because I really enjoy cooking.
It may seem like asking students to fulfill volunteer hours during a graduate program is asking a bit much (actually, most everything about grad school is asking a bit much, but also we asked for it to ask for a bit much soo…) but I think it’s actually a pretty clever way to get us out of our heads when it comes to school. Most of us have done a pretty good job at attempting to have fun outside of class, but it’s very easy to get tunnel vision around the goal of getting through the semester, and volunteering is one way of reminding ourselves that life outside of school goes on.
Speaking of life outside of class, I wanted to give some insight into living situations now that I’ve been in Morgantown for 3 months.
I moved into a sublet situation in University Park Apartments, primarily because I wanted the convenience of being within walking distance of campus. I don’t have a car, so this came to be pretty important. For anyone thinking of moving to Morgantown I would say that a sublet is actually a pretty good deal. For one thing, there are far more of them available than any actual leases if you are moving outside of the normal Fall/Spring student cycle. For another, if the situation turns out to be less than ideal, you aren’t stuck there for a full year, and you can start looking for a new place to live more quickly. (My living situation has turned out to be a mixed bag. I have a good roommate, but the building itself is filled with rowdy undergraduates who like to do things like vomit in the elevator and start using a hammer at 5:30am, because when else would they possibly hang that picture??). I’m only here until June, and I’ve already signed a lease for another place. I'll be moving from the Evansdale area to Downtown, close enough to the PRT to take it to class everyday. So in the end I had the convenience I required for my first months here, and now have the opportunity to find something more comfortable and suited to a Graduate student.
Because whatever doesn’t kill you, hopefully won’t take a full 12-month lease to be over.
That’s all I have for right now. I’ve been really pleased to see that I’ve had a fair number of people reading this blog! I know my blog is a little bit different from the other student blogs available, so I hope my insights into life as a graduate student have been enlightening.
-Rizzo
Downtown Morgantown
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