From the horse's mouth

Hi everybody. This is Spencer and I am pleased to announce that I am officially oriented as a medical student. All in all it was a pretty fun and informative week (August 11-16). I feel better prepared for class to start tomorrow, but I can't help but think they were just lulling us into a false sense of security before the flood gates open.

We started out orientation with a day at Camp Loughridge. I thought we were going to be doing summer camp type things like canoeing and singing Kumbaya around an open fire. Instead we took a personality test and discussed the different aspects of the test (like the differences between how introverts and extroverts think). It was fun to start to get to know people in my class. That night was a dinner sponsored by the Oklahoma Osteopathic Association of which I am now a member.

Tuesday was on campus where we were introduced to the faculty, got our lockers and ID badges.

Wednesday the professors who will be teaching the labs this semester (anatomy and histology) gave us a run-down of the class- this was kinda like the first day of class at BYU where usually you just get the syllabus and leave early. Then in the afternoon they talked to us about student well-being which was a lot of stress management, mental health and the trainer from the fitness center scared everybody. This is our trainer on campus.

Thursday morning was “Med School the Musical!” put on by a bunch of second years. It was a bunch of parody songs about studying, having no life, and everything else medical school. It was pretty entertaining and a nice break from the presentations up to that point. After a few more presentations from the second years, there was a big service project planned for the afternoon. The group I was with first went to an elementary school that the med school has kind of adopted. Some took height and weight measurements, and others cleaned up the playground. I was with a group that went to the kindergarten and read stories, played games, and did anything else the teachers wanted us to do to occupy the kids' time and energy. I read stories for an hour and a half to 3 of the boys in the class. You can tell that some of the kids come from unstable homes by the way they just couldn't get enough of the attention we were giving them (they told us that something like 80% of the school is on the federal lunch program). After school got out, we went to the food bank to sort cans. Last December, this food bank received millions of cans of food. These cans have been sitting on pallets since and most of them do not have labels on them. We all learned that you can still tell what in in the can if it does not have a label-there is a 3-letter code stamped on the cans identifying the contents. After we identified the contents, the food bank has their own labels that we would then put on the cans. It is a pretty monotonous and slow process, but I found it fascinating how this group of super-competitive med students dove right in, got organized and worked at this furious pace trying to see how many cans we could get through in the hour and a half we were there. I also got pretty good at spotting botulism and otherwise unusable cans.

Friday morning we toured the OSU Medical Center. We wont be there till 3rd and 4th year for rotations, but it was a nice change of scenery. It is a decent sized hospital and even though it is a pretty old building, it is still really nice.

Saturday was the White Coat Ceremony. This was a fairly short event where a few of the second year leaders said something, the president of the medical school spoke, then we all lined up and were called one at a time on stage to have our white coats put on us. It is kinda like a symbolic transition to the medical profession. It was nice, but still kinda felt like I was being lulled.

So that was my week. I feel very comfortable here and just know this is the right school for us. I am excited for the challenges ahead (that start tomorrow) and can't see myself doing anything else.