Hello world!

I touched down in Ann Arbor more than a week ago! In my first few days back, I spent time running errands, celebrating happy hours with close friends, exchanging stories and souvenirs from our travels, and NOT unpacking my bags! Yes, one week back in Ann Arbor and I still have not unpacked my bags, oh my. They are taking up more than half the floor space in my room creating a concentrated center of chaos, but if I don't unpack then it means my summer adventures have not yet ended, right?

Wrong. School started last Monday and we began with our M2 cardiovascular sequence and it's 7.5 hours of lecture daily. On the first day of school I immediately had trouble figuring out the new lecture capture system, but I managed to reset my password and start streaming my introduction to M2 year lecture. The lecture system has vastly improved since last year. Previously the image quality was very pixelated and this made reading the slides difficult to impossible. Now you can watch a crisp image of the lecturer on one side of the screen (finally a face and not just a mysterious lecturer voice) and the slides on the other. The slides are also quickly posted after every lecture on a simplified website instead of the previous challenge of us hunting through many computer files in search for the newest lecture. It's amazing how these changes can really improve the quality of the streaming experience for those of us that rely heavily on this learning method.

My first quiz of M2 year is now done! 7.5 hours of lecture per day and 300 pages of material was very tiresome, but I managed to survive as always (love pass-fail). Now we have a quiz free weekend coming up and the new challenge is staying focused and on top of studying without the pressure of an upcoming quiz. I hope I make it! At least the material is incredibly interesting compared to last year. I feel like I am actually learning how to become a doctor and it is exciting! Today we had a lecture on hypertension, which was the main topic of my summer research in Mexico. When people in Real del Monte would ask me why does salt increase blood pressure, I had no foundation of knowledge with which to respond. With this latest lecture, I now know the kidneys sense the salt increase and transiently increase blood pressure to get rid of the salt from the body! I also use to think that the blood pressure readings your doctor takes in his office were very accurate, but I now know continuous at-home blood pressure monitoring is more accurate and predictive of cardiovascular complications. So much knowledge! Amazing!

M2 year will certainly not be easy, but I'm excited to overcome the cognitive and psychological challenges that lie ahead... A new adventure perhaps?