Books, books & more books

Well so far I have spent over $800 in books and that’s only for the first semester. Yikes. I’m sure the UBC Health Sciences bookstore must just rub their hands together with glee when they see us all marching in. Stupidly, in a bid to finally clean up my apt and make room for all of my new textbooks, I threw out (aka recycled) 4 general science books that I’m now realizing would be really helpful to have as a reference. So far my favorite book is the one used book I picked up tonight – a medical dictionary. Yesterday when I started to do my homework, I must have used the online version about 20 times. There’s A LOT of words I don’t know. Someone told me that the time you feel the smartest is from when you get your med school acceptance until you start med school. From then on, you’re just constantly made aware of what you don’t know. And how quickly it is that I’m heading down that road. But on an up note, we had an intro to the family practice continuum today. Imagine, that after only 4 weeks some of us will head into family doctors offices to start observing. HOW COOL IS THAT!! It’s nice that they give us access to patients so early on in the program so that you never lose sight of what you’re doing this for. Now I just have to hope that I don’t end up in Maple Ridge for that experience, given that I’m carless. That would be a steep bill from the ol’ car coop. The other thing we did today was some histology lectures & labs, basically microscope work. The lab is an amazing facility filled with flat screen computer monitors that we can view all of our slides on (and all of the slides are online so that we can view them from home using this free microscope simulation program to zoom in & out). I tell you, it definitely feels like no expense was spared in the creation of these facilities for us. I feel like my tuition money is being put to good use! Good thing too because I certainly seem to be parting with lots of it.