Friday, April 28, 2017

It's not over till it's over

This is my last blog post as a pharm masters student. This year has gone by so quickly and I cannot believe it is over and I really wish thay it would last longer. I have fallen madly in live with New Orleans and want to stay. Right now I'm still waiting for responses from med schools so we shall see where the road takes me, but im looking forward to what the future holds. Ive learned a lot about science, people, medicine, and culture. Jazz fest is this weekend and next so the coming weeks are going to hold a lot of excitement.
This month we didn't have too many formal classes so I had a lot of time to volunteer and shadow. One of the most amazing things I have got to see this month is a live donor transplant. Since I volunteer in TATU, I was able to shadow some of the surgeons and this month they allowed me to shadow a live donor kidney transplant. I was able to watch both the nephrectomy and the transplat and wish I could show you what I saw because it was unbelievable.
Another cool thing I am looking forward to this week is CDG day at Tulane. I will be working with children with rare genetic disorders while their parents come in for information about studies being performed here for their child. I am looking forward to interracting with the patients who will hopefully benefit from the studies that we are working on here at Tulane.
In addition, this month we all had the oppurtunity for soil collection as part of a research prohect that measures lead levels in New Orleans. Putting time towards ongoing research to benefit the people of the city was pretty awesome.
We had some really great seminars this semester and we just had the forty-fifth annual schüeler distinguished lecture in pharmacology where Eric N. Olsen discussed his research on "The Correction of Disease by Genome Editing: The Ultimate Precision Medicine" which was a phenomenal lecture. In addition I was able to sit through a few surgical conferences, so April really was a very informative month. Sad to log in hours for the last time, but I'm excited to see what the future holds.

Hours for April: 19
Hours for the second semester: 52
Hours for the year: 87