Two finals done, one to go. Orgo was Thursday, and physics was today; despite what I thought was inadequate preparation, I think both went pretty well. Bio will take some work, but at least I have the weekend. More later — for now, I plan to just kick back until tomorrow.

Success is supposed to breed more success. Those extra lost pounds are supposed to inspire harder workouts; that first million is supposed to inspire more hard work and creativity; the first A is supposed to inspire harder work to keep up the grades. Until the summer session started, I can’t say that was the case for me. The beginning of the school year would always start with plenty of promise, and I’d do reasonably well in the first exams. However, while most of my friends improved or at least stayed consistent over the semester, I would invariably start to fall behind. By the end of the semester, I’d be hopelessly behind and my grades would reflect it. The spring semester would start off on a bad note and only get worse. I could never figure it out — why wasn’t I inspired to work, to keep up the grades and succeed in school?

The answer may lie in something I only accepted recently. Until the summer session, I never worked for any of my grades. My high school Magnet program was supposed to offer higher level courses, and it certainly did…but I got a decent GPA on minimal effort for all four years. The first few weeks of any course are always easy, and I always did well without studying very hard for any of them. The resulting grades were never much of an inspiration because I had invested so little of myself into them. As a result, there was no feedback mechanism telling me to work harder (or to work at all) for the next exam. My grades would suffer, but at that point I was unconcerned, and the ultimate grades in the end were always good enough. I’m not proud of my high school GPA at all, but it was good enough to get me into an excellent college.

So what happened at Cornell? Having never truly studied in my life, I attempted to pull off the same feat in the fall of 1995. Again, the first round of exams was reasonable, and again I had convinced myself that no real work was necessary to do well. Well, that barely worked in high school and it most definitely didn’t work in college. The fact that I did as well as I did (which was not very well), and that I graduated on time, is a testament to my creativity and problem-solving skills more than my work ethic. Looking back, I can’t believe I totally squandered the academic opportunities that were right under my nose. I can’t say that I spent all of that time doing something more productive, because I truly didn’t. I never had a passion for my school work; while some of that couldn’t be helped, I now realize that a lot of “passion” is really the dividend of good hard work.

While consulting was never truly for me, I think I repeated the pattern at Accenture. I very strongly believe that my talents were underutilized and that my first few roles really left me burnt out. In retrospect, however, I see some situations in which I could and should have acted differently. When faced with a seriously distasteful task, there were better ways to express my annoyance and better paths to finding a solution. In the end, I think I still would have left. But maybe the last five years of my professional life would have been a little happier, a little less bitter, and a lot more personally satisfying if I’d understood the value of true effort.

I hesitate to say that I’ve wasted a lot of time. I can think of important lessons I’ve learned every year, and I’ve certainly grown a lot since leaving college. But the fact is that I’ve sort of reset myself, put myself at the beginning of a long path, one that places me some seven years behind most of my academic peers. I can’t do anything about the lost time, and it’s tempting to ignore the years, but doing so would probably be dangerous. I have a lot to offer from my experiences, as well as a lot to remember for myself.

Most importantly, I have to remember that nothing in life is free. The biggest rewards have the highest prices; surprisingly, those prices have little to do with money. Indeed, the non-financial costs figure to be much higher and more dear than anything my checkbook could buy. And our greatest asset — time — can be our most powerful ally or our worst enemy. Making the most of my time, using it to invest in myself and work towards a goal, is really the only way for me to find satisfaction in any field. It’s not just about the passion.

Ugh. The lectures on neurobiology have been pretty interesting, but the corresponding chapter in the textbook is drier than sand. Time for a break.

I made a series of posts last May discussing my decision to quit work and pursue medicine. At the time, I was fully committed to becoming a clinician — the type of physician most people interact with at hospitals and clinics. I still want to do clinical work, but going to school has opened my eyes to the possibility of doing medical research as well.

One of the reasons why I left my old job was that it was utterly uncreative. For the most part, the business of implementation and maintaining solutions is a copy-paste affair, and any real brilliance is deeply hidden. I didn’t like the fact that I was basically repeating someone else’s work, slightly modified if at all different, and getting paid for it. I wanted to do something more difficult and integrative, as well as something that would stir up my inner passions. Clinical medicine is undoubtedly more rewarding and more challenging than IT work, and most clinicians are given novel situations on a regular basis. But just how novel is it? How varied are the treatments, and how much can a physician innovate in a clinical setting?

Without digging beyond the superficial, my gut reaction is to say “not much.” In a clinical or hospital setting, doctors are counted on to cure disease reliably, which doesn’t leave a lot of room for new or untested treatments. While every patient is unique, requiring attention to detail and slight differences in the approach of care, I believe that clinical care also has some “copy/paste” aspect to it. Of course, advances in medicine would introduce new therapies on a regular basis. But at the heart of the matter, most of the work would involve using someone else’s solutions slightly modified to suit the individual. Sound familiar?

To me, the big downside to doing pure biomedical reasearch would be a lack of interaction with patients. I want to see that my work is having a real and direct affect, and there is no more explicit display of success or failure than the fate of the patient. But wouldn’t it be great if one could develop new therapies for disease? Rather than, say, using existing chemotherapy techniques to fight a tumor, how rewarding might it be to develop a new form of therapy, try it on a patient, and directly observe its effectiveness? Not only would one be involved in patient care, one could potentially find an entirely new treatment. That would be far more rewarding to me than simply treating (and hopefully curing) a long list of patients. It’s analagous to treating the cause rather than the effects, or the disease rather than the symptoms. I could think of no better or more important contribution that I could make to society than a new way to save lives. So why not go for it — why shouldn’t I work towards an MD-PhD?

Well, for starters, reality is not so willing to accept the rose-colored vision that I espouse above. For one, it’s a lot of work. In addition to the traditional four-year program, MD-PhDs require some time to research and defend a thesis. The most aggressive timeline for obtaining both degrees is about 6.5 years, but most students seem to do it in at least seven. Furthermore, there’s no guarantee that research will result in a revolutionary new discovery. The specificity and relatively obscurity of most research groups won’t automatically lead to a cure for cancer or HIV. A scientist would have to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right knowledge and determination, to put everything together into something significant.

There’s also the reality that research and clinical work are probably more likely to conflict than supplement each other. Someone who is committed to research will not have much time left over for patient care, while a dedicated clinical physician won’t find it easy to work in a lab. I don’t know how or where the balance is struck, or if there even is a balance at all. I would be disappointed if I didn’t work with patients after medical school.

Finally, there’s the reality of getting into this kind of program and seeing it through. NIH offers funding through their MSTP program for some schools to take on formal MD-PhD candidates when they first apply. MSTP pays for school tuition and also provides a stipend, so this would be ideal; unfortunately, most MSTP-funded schools accept something like five students per year. My nontraditional situation, coupled with a lack of formal research training, would make me a poor candidate. Most school do offer PhD funding by itself, though; this might be a reasonable option. The other related issue is time. I’m already a few years older than the typical medical students, and taking time to receive a PhD won’t make me any younger. Is it worth the extra time, extra accrued interest on my loans, and extra workload?

These are all questions I plan to answer relatively soon. I want to take on some part-time work (paid or unpaid) in the spring semester. Preparation for the MCAT in April will keep me pretty busy, but it’s absolutely crucial that I form a stronger idea of how much I want to pursue research. Georgetown’s medical school is on campus and seems to have a reasonably sized research department, so I guess I’ll start my inquiries over there.

But that can wait until after the holiday. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Congratulations to Eric and Tina on their lovely wedding and reception last Saturday. I was honored to be a groomsman, and I’m very happy for them. I’m also quite jealous of their Hawaiian honeymoon.

On a more selfish note, it was not a very good weekend for them to get married. I had a bio midterm on Thursday, a physics midterm on Friday, and an organic midterm on Monday. So far, so good — I did very well on the first two. I’ll hopefully know how well I did in organic tomorrow. It was definitely my hardest exam so far, and I barely had one day to prepare for it; on top of that, I fell behind in the two weeks leading up to the test. While I answered everything, I’m not certain that I got it at all correct. I was planning to goof off until next Monday, since Thanksgiving is cutting the week short. The problem is that I would then be starting next week behind again. The result: I’m probably headed to school early tomorrow so that I don’t have an insurmountable pile of work on Monday. We’ll see how I feel about it in the morning.

I’m looking forward to the break. We’re all tired, and finals are only a couple of weeks away. On top of that, I’d like some time to introspect and evaluate. It’s easy to get caught up in the daily affairs of life, and the big picture sometimes gets a little cloudy. Expect some more musings in the near future. Possible topics: Career direction, academic stamina, the conflicts of ambition and personal commitment.

(Side note: My writing style tonight is terse and clippy, Hemingway-esque. Interesting.)

I keep meaning to write a defining entry here, but it keeps getting pushed off. That’s likely to continue for at least the next 24 hours. It’s crunch time again — orgo midterm was Monday night, bio is Thursday morning, and physics is Friday morning. I feel relatively good about the chemistry exam, although I already know where I missed a few points. Bio was my weak point last time, mostly due to a lack of detail in my answers. I plan to rectify that this time, but there’s just no telling how I’ll do. I expect to do well in physics, as long as I get adequate time to study for it following the bio exam. On top of all this, of course, I need/want to stay on top of the reading materials in all my courses and try not to put myself too far behind on a few big projects with looming deadlines.

Well, off to bed.

This week brings with it the first midterm for each of my classes. Bio is Thursday morning, and physics is Friday morning. My organic chemistry exam was tonight. Like most of the exams I had over the summer, I wasn’t sure this afternoon whether I’d prepared enough for it. I had gone over the problems, reread the lecture notes, re-skimmed the book, and everything else, but I had the usual niggling doubts. Did I really cover everything? What if I missed a key point or two that would end up making a big difference? Well, in the past I’d done perfectly well with the same feelings, so I wasn’t very concerned going into the exam.

Holy crap, that was hard. But I’m actually not upset about it.

I won’t be surprised at all to see that I missed some points on the exam, and I expect that it will be much harder for me to earn a high grade in this class. In all honesty, however, I prefer exams that err on the side of being too difficult. This exam asked questions that were not straight out of our notes or homework. Someone with good knowledge of the subject material would be able to solve any of them, but the problems presented were mostly new. Of course, even with proper preparation, some might not be able to put their knowledge to use in the proper way. I much prefer this kind of test to one that simply asks for regurgitated information. It’s simply too easy to give a test in organic chemistry that tests only memorization skills. The real question is whether students can take their memorized information and actually do something “useful” with it, and that’s why I love it when professors come up with difficult tests.

Even if I end up with a big red academic welt on my butt by the time I walk out of there, I like knowing that I really got a chance to exercise what I’ve learned. There’s a sort of competitive edge to it as well, although most of the time I’m just competing against myself. I can’t tell how well I did tonight, but I’ll be comfortable with my score regardless. Hopefully it’s a score that will help to get me into med school.

For now, though, it’s time to sleep. Can you tell I’m drained?

When we were kids, the resounding message sent by the media (somewhat ironically, perhaps) was that “television is evil.” There were frequent reports about television viewing leading to poor eyesight, lower intelligence, shorter attention span, increased weight, risky sexual activity, violence, and most other sociomoral (is that a word?) vices. Despite this, Americans continued to watch television, and more of it, as programming became increasingly salacious and hedonistic. We are still being told that television is bad. I don’t know if any of the given reasons is true, but I do know that TV is not inherently bad in itself.

The problem is that television watching is nearly always physically passive while being mentally stimulating. No, perhaps it’s not very enlightening to watch that episode of Seinfeld for the tenth time, but the images and sound coming out of the box are all stimulating your senses in the biological sense. And you will continue to be stimulated, whether you are watching that Seinfeld episode, the commercials that are interspersed throughout the show, or whatever it is that might come next. In fact, even if you don’t particularly like what you’re watching, you’ll probably still watch. And therein lies the danger, at least for me.

It’s hard to resist the promise of neverending stimulation like that. Suppose you’re sitting on your living room couch, with no great urge to do anything in particular. You could stare off into space, literally doing nothing; you could pick up a book and put forth the effort to understand what you read; you could see if someone else is around and start a conversation, if you have anything in particular to say; or you can push the power button on the remote. The activity that requires the absolute least effort — doing nothing — is terribly boring, and the passage of time is painfully obvious in most cases. But turning on the TV involves barely any additional work, and the reward is a bright moving picture show that rewards you for just sitting there. What’s better is that it never ends. You don’t have to turn a single page, think of something to say, or think of anything at all. There’s really nothing wrong with passive entertainment like that, and there are times when it is both appropriate and necessary to relax in this manner. In my experience, however, I am unable to turn away when it’s time to stop. The half-hour show ends, and before I know it I’m halfway through something I would never choose to watch on my own.

Random web surfing has the same effect, only it’s potentially more dangerous; after all, the medium — my computer — happens to also be a ubiquitous tool in almost every aspect of my life. Whereas the television is objectively about as important to me when it’s off as when it’s on, I need my computer for a good portion of the week. And when it’s on, it’s just ridiculously easy to check out CNN.com (for the tenth time), check my email (after a five-minute hiatus), or look up something marginally related to my work…and then get distracted by a different article I might find during my research.

What’s the solution? Have you ever heard of someone who successfully went cold turkey on anything and succeeded? It’s doable in the short term, but nearly impossible to do forever. People who swear off carbs, fats, or sweets might be able to do it for a week. But if you have a problem with eating too much of a certain food, it’s probably because you enjoy it. How easy can it be to deny yourself — forever — something that you like? This is why going cold turkey is so difficult, and why it takes more than a vague desire to “be better” to fix it — you have to actively dislike what you liked. It’s not easy, and it’s even harder when you’re dealing with something addictive like cigarettes.

Anyway, the more feasible solution is to cut back. When the activity is not particularly harmful, it’s fine to indulge now and then; as a matter of fact, it’s probably beneficial to “waste time” for part of the day. I’m learning to stay away from the Safari icon and the remote until I’m done reading for class. When it comes to boring projects, the web is never more than a click away…and I still get burned from time to time. I can usually get by if I promise myself some time to waste as soon as I’m done. The key, for me at least, is to follow through on that promise. If I can’t keep my own promises, how will I ever follow through with anyone else?

Speaking of school, I’ve got to get caught up for tomorrow. I have some thoughts about the semester so far, but I’ll expound on a later date.

It’s odd…as time goes by, I tend to appreciate long stretches of empty time less and less. I love wasting time as much as anyone else, but day after day of nothing really just brings me down these days. I spent a good portion of my break working on our master bathroom, tearing out the old shower stall walls and installing new cement board and new tile. After that, I’ve fallen into a bit of a slump. There were still things to be done, but I ended up procrastinating and sitting around the house for the most part. It was a sort of build-up of intertia, but not the dynamic kind. Now that the school year is starting up again, I think things will get better.

Well, that was fast. I took my final yesterday, and grades should be posted within the next day or so. It was much more difficult for me to focus this week, but I’m feeling very confident about my performance anyway.

This was certainly one of the fastest summers in recent memory. I was nervous about the transition from employee to student, and it turned out to be about as difficult as I had feared. On the other hand, I definitely put forth my best effort and it appears that that will be more than enough. The fall semester should be less intense, but I’ll be taking three courses at once and there will be far less individual attention in class.

Enough school talk. Abbie and Jack are staying over tonight, and tomorrow we’re all heading to Ocean City. In typical Blair fashion, the weather forecast calls for rain, but we won’t be deterred; really, the beach is only a sort of side attraction to the main goal of our trip. It’s time for the fifth annual crab fest! Just as we did last year, we’ll be going to Hooper’s to take advantage of their all-you-can-eat feast. We’ll be happy and full even if the beach washes away overnight; sure, it would be a waste of an overpriced boardwalk hotel reservation, but I suppose that’s the way it goes sometimes.

Mmmmm…..crabby.

School has certainly taken up more of my time than I had expected. Nevertheless, I have prevailed — I ended the first session about two weeks ago with a high A. At the risk of sounding overly pompous, I probably would have earned an A+ if they were offered by Georgetown.

There was certainly a good amount of adjustment involved in the beginning. Combined with the fact that I had been out of school for so long was the constant reminder that I had not been a stellar student (to say the least) back then. I was unsure enough of my abilities that I scared myself into studying like I was insane. For first time, ever, I went over the day’s lecture notes at home, then followed up by reading the book and taking notes as I went along. In the end, I would typically have taken notes twice for each topic. I’ve never done that before, and I think it made a big difference. I definitely can’t credit my performance to prior knowledge of the subject material — yes, I’m sure it helped somewhat, but I know that every lecture felt like totally new ground to me. That’s not too hard to imagine, since I took general chemistry some nine years ago.

The second session is going about as well, but I haven’t been able to focus or work quite as hard. I think some of it is the typical student laziness, but I’m also being a little more selective about how and what I study. I’m still reading the book and going over lecture notes, but I’m less careful about topics that I get very quickly and more careful about the ones that need more attention. I’m spending less time studying, but the subject material has remained at largely the same level of difficulty. Still, my strategy seems to be paying off — I’m on track to get anoter solid A (so far) and I’ve been able to spend more time on things outside of school. In the fall, when I’ll be taking organic chemistry, physics, and biology all at the same time, my performance will absolutely depend on the ability to make effective use of my time. And having time for myself will be absolutely essential if I don’t want to burn out before the end of the semester.