This side of the fence

This weekend was the first of two where prospective students come interview at Western. As admissions rep on council for my class along with one other person, I'm responsible for planning the student run portion of those weekends. That mostly involves having members of the class be around to chat with people, take them to interviews, take them to register and so on.

In truth, the main reason I wanted the position when I decided to run for it back in September was because of the experience I had coming to Western for my interview last year. The second years (then first years) that were there to put us at ease certainly did a great job of that for me. And so, I've been looking forward to this experience ever since I got elected to the job.

Having seen both sides now, I would have to say first off that I'm certainly a fan of this job. Besides the lack of stress in just hanging out and talking to people, I think I've gained some perspective on how much I, and likely all my classmates, have changed over the last 6 months or however long I've been at this med school thing.

I suppose any change is usually too subtle to be noticed if a person is observed consistently, and observing yourself would likely be no different. But just seeing the crowds of interviewees coming through the doors over the last two days has reminded me of what a difference I see in myself from this time last year.

Most of that difference lies in my perception of direction for my life, which I suppose shouldn't be shocking. But I remember how focused I was on medical school as the end goal of all the school I had been doing for so long. Suddenly school has a whole different purpose, and even if my study habits haven't changed dramatically and much of the learning I do still has a focus on the upcoming exam, I think I've convinced myself reasonably that learning for the sake of learning really is what it's about now.

The second part isn't as meaningful perhaps, but medical school in many ways isn't as stressful as undergrad. Just looking around the room, you see a bunch of laid back first years from my class and a group of interviewees who are doing their best to look calm. Granted, an interview isn't the right venue to make a fair comparison on stress levels, but the pressure to get marks in undergrad as compared to the pass/fail system of med school takes just enough of that edge of pressure off to put the stress level down a notch.

Either way, when asked by various students if I had any parts of Western that I didn't really like or if I had any regrets, I had to think long and hard to come up with anything. And I think that's a good thing.

Dominican - here I come... errr... was

My posting has been conspicuously absent lately, but I blame at least part of that on my trip to the Dominican. Not to mention the exams preceeding it and the exam studying preceeding that and the crazy amount of work done on the admissions video previous to that. So with that summary of the last month thrown at you, I'll return to the more interesting portion - Dominican.

Along with 29 classmates and two friends of classmates, I headed down to San Juan, Dominican Republic for a week during our March break. Here we are:















If nothing else, this attests to how close our class really has become - the group that went is by no means representative of one particular clique from within the class. From its humble beginnings as a few people from the class talking about heading south for the break, it snowballed into the group you see above. Somewhere along the way, my friend Matt convinced me that I had to come, since we could play tennis every day. Which we almost did. And so I was hauled on board.

Most of my week was pretty relaxing - laying on the beach, reading, playing cards, swimming, etc. In fact, I polished off the back half of the Narnia series and read a third of The Iliad (I ran out of reading material and it was what available for borrowing). As well, I nurtured my crotchety old man side by playing copious amounts of bridge. That's right. I can admit that I like bridge. A couple of attempts at windsurfing, at which I actually made some progress (Jonathan take note) rounded out the majority of my activities for the week.

I did partake in one day trip, a catamaran voyage to go snorkelling at two different reefs. It was an amazing day. Other than the 7am departure time, it was a near perfect day. The weather was, along with pretty much the entire week, perfect. Hot, sunny, barely a cloud in the sky. The crew that ran the boat was great, entertaining enough on their own to make for a great day. The variety of fish and coral in the reefs was amazing, and I remembered how much fun I had snorkelling in Florida with my family a number of years ago. We sailed back under sail power, and saw a group of whales, and I'm pretty sure I caught a glimpse of a dolphin at one point. To boot, I won a bottle of rum in a cannonball contest. How did skinny man Art Winter win a cannonball contest you ask? Well, my years of experience in my home pool has taught me that a cannonball contest is won on technique, and that technique is the canopener (or jacknife) whose splash is so much more impressive than a cannonball can ever be.

I could throw in a few other stories - a 3 hour game of pool basketball that slowly degraded into "kill the guy with the ball," many late nights singing karaoke (either in the karaoke bar there or just on our own), generally making a ruckus as a large group of people, and so on. But I'll leave you with a couple shots of the scenery as I remember when I could wear shorts last week...