Hello Everyone!  Hope everyone had a good summer, this was probably the worst summer I’ve had in a while because I was studying the whole time, more than I do during the school year actually.  I took Biol 234 and then Bioc 302 and both were quite intense, or maybe I still wasn’t really used to the fast paced summer format.

Before I get into that, I want to talk about my ER Scribe job because I get a lot of emails about it!  Sorry if I haven’t responded to some, my inbox is kind of crazy right now.  So the biggest question I get is how did I find out about this job.  I found out about it through Pre-Med Society at UBC.  When you are in the club you get a lot of volunteer opportunities and I saw this in my email and it caught my eye.  Now there are no other real ER Scribe programs in Canada, it’s more big in the States, thats why no one really knows about it here.  As far as undergraduate students, there are only 2 of us at the hospital, and that is mostly because as an undergraduate student, your schedule is very limited, so someone with a medical office assistant degree would be ideal.  But I luckily obtained the position, and I get the opportunity to see a lot. The ER is filled with a variety of cases, acute cases and more simple cases, it’s definitely a fast paced job.  I think ideally a student who may not have gotten into medical school their first try, and have a year off before re-applying this job would be perfect, and the person would be free to work as well as get recommendation letters and experience.

Now as for summer school, I took Biol 234, and I was really worried because I don’t know anyone who has taken the course and liked it.  I really do bad with genetics, never quite learned it in Biol 121, but surprisingly I didn’t mind the course.  It was heavily based on problem solving and the 3 online quizzes and 3 tutorial quizzes a week made it hard to fall behind.  Overall I did better than I expected, still a tricky course, don’t take it unless you have to.

Bioc 302 was a very dense course, its like 2 courses in 1.  I was worried because I knew taking it in the summer could go really bad or really good.  The first half was with Dr. Maurus, and had like..Nucleic Acids, DNA Replication/Transcription, etc, etc.  First lecture was shocking because of all the detail, I used the textbook to just follow along with the diagrams, because most of the slides are figures, so going in the book to read the details on the figure was the most useful part of the book.  For this part of the course, tutorials are more important than lecture, to me atleast.  Alym was the TA and he was really good, best TA I have had at UBC, doing all the tutorials is great practice for the midterm, as some questions from it or similar questions show up on the midterm.  I didn’t do as well as I wanted on the midterm because of stupid mistakes 🙁  Like literally over-thinking and because it was out of 50 one bad question really brought down my grade.  The second section was taught by Dr. Krisinger, and he taught Fatty Acids and Amino Acids.  This part of the course is sooo dense, like so much information, the first part doesnt seem so bad when your studying this.  He posted all his lectures online, so I noticed the class started to dwindle in size a bit.  For his part of the course, I kept up, it was summer and I wasn’t working at the hospital that much, so I had nothing else to do but keep up.  By the time the final came, I just re-read, re-wrote, and did the practice exams, and I did much better, probably one of my highest grades on a final exam at UBC.  Do not bother with the textbook for this portion, except for doing problem set questions, which I think are overly challenging, but if you have extra time it cant hurt.

So, this school year I have probably the easiest semester I’ve ever had at UBC.  I think summer school taught me to be a better student because I learned to use my time very efficiently, I hope I can keep doing that.  I am taking:

FNH 350, MICB 306, GERM 200, ECON 310.

Honestly don’t know what to do with myself because this workload seems so chill compared to what I’ve had in the past…but I’m most worried about MICB 306. I noticed with some MICB courses, keeping up is sometimes not enough because of the grading.  For FNH 350, the course outline is looking verryyy similar to BIOC 302.  So that can’t hurt me, the part I hate is that its an 8am class, only ONE section of this course.  Luckily I am on campus this year, but this is primarily a commuter school, some people commute from Surrey, or Richmond.  UBC.. leave at least 2 sections available if one is an 8am so there is at least an opportunity to not be stuck with an 8am course.  I am not a morning person at all..