Some birthday this has been. USC rejected me without interview. Ever so slowly, the Cali schools are rejecting me.
11:43 PM

 
Interviewing for three days is hard. It's harder when the schools are not in the same city. Even harder when one of them is a city I've never been to and don't know anything about.

It's tiring. I almost wasn't able to stay awake at some points of the interview days. I think they went well, but I say that about all my interviews. Maybe I'm jinxing myself.
12:52 PM

 
Holy crap....didn't check my MIT email for a week. SO MANY MESSAGES. Like holy crap. It's fucking IAP people.

In any case, I'm at home this IAP. At school, I check my email multiple times a day. But at home, I nearly don't check it at all. I don't have my computer running 24 hours a day. I do stuff that takes me away from computer access. It seems that almost anywhere I go at MIT, there's a computer available no matter what I'm doing.

So yeah, if you need something, you probably need to call me. Is that so hard? You all have cell phones.
2:14 PM

 
Oh yeah. My interview in Chigago went pretty well. Hopefully, I'll be hearing from them soon. Well, rather, hearing good news...and not, you know, bad news. Then, I'll at least have a place to go.
10:30 PM

 
"Medical education does not exist to provide students with a way of making a living, but to ensure the health of the community."
-Rudolf Virchow
12:58 PM

 
Being home for all of IAP is pretty boring.

The plan was to be ready in case I got some interviews at Cali schools. Well, that didn't really work out. It's gonna be pretty sucky to fly back for interviews, if I even get any.

But obviously, knowing that now, I would have much rather gone back to MIT for IAP. I have Lion Dance to run for one. Fortunately, it's the year I need to pass it on to a new person. So now, it's a kind of trial by fire, rather than mentor-trainee. There's the EMT class which needs training as well as IAP being the funnest time to staff the ambulance. And there's the CSC New Year's Banquet to work on.

Kind of thinking about giving up on that last one. Since I email out and no one replies. It's like "hello...I've done this since before most of you were even students at MIT." Yeah, Tiff Yu was in charge the past two years, but don't underestimate how much behind the scenes work I did to make it work. I know a whole lot of stuff that Tiff cannot help you with. By running AV, I basically ran Banquet during Banquet. I've done this so long, that no one else fucking knows how to do it. Blow me off. Okay. Forget to call me up to the stage at the end of banquet thank yous. Okay. Make me shave my head for a video that doesn't even get shown. Fine. I'm fucking out of here. Later. Good fucking bye. Senioritis strikes. Have a good fucking day.
10:59 AM

 
Deferred.

That word sucks. Rejected is bad. Accepted is awesome. But it really sucks not knowing. I don't have the same confidence that I had when I applied for undergrad. I was fairly sure that the UCs would accept me, so I wasn't too bummed when my earlies deferred me. But this time around...there's no school that I can say almost for sure will accept me. It's scary.
8:55 PM

 
Life, it's ever so strange
It's so full of change
Think that you've worked it out
then BANG
Right out of the blue
Something happens to you
To throw you off course

It's just a ride, it's just a ride
no need to run, no need to hide
It'll take you round and round
Sometimes you're up
sometimes you're down
It's just a ride, it's just a ride
don't be scared
don't hide your eyes
It may feel so real inside
but don't forget it's just a ride

Slowly, oh so very slowly
accept that
there's no getting off
So live it, just gotta go with it
coz this ride's, never gonna stop

It's just a ride, it's just a ride
no need to run, no need to hide
It'll take you all around
Sometimes you're up
sometimes you're down
It's just a ride, it's just a ride
don't be scared now
dry your eyes
It may feel so real inside
but don't forget enjoy the ride
8:51 PM

 
5.13 Final. FUCKING RIDICULOUS.

Practice Final. Completely misleading. Practice final problems were all doable. And by doable, I mean fairly straightforward stuff that you could expect.

Real final. There were problems on there that would probably take a chemistry professor the time of the final to work out. Even if I had been able to study for the entire reading period, it wouldn't have helped. A third of the test was spectoscopy problems that also required you to write a mechanism with arrow pushing and basically only provided proton NMR info. The IR info was useless, no carbon NMR, no elemental analysis info, no IHD info. And the proton NMR info didn't match any patterns and seemed to indicate impossible carbon frameworks. How can they expect people to figure out what the start and end molecules were using the extremely incomplete data and then figure out all the transition molecules as well?

I can essentially say without a doubt that this was the hardest test I've ever taken in my life. Ever. I think pretty much everyone I talked to felt the same way. And that might be the only out that I have.
4:53 PM

 
T minus 11 hours.

I'm fading...still have stuff to go over too...
2:28 AM

 
Crap...finally finished with my 7.21 take home test. I'm probably gonna be up all night studying for 5.13 right up until the test at 1:30. This is a bad situation.

I dunno if I'll be able to manage an all nighter right now. My eyes feel really blurry. But if I take a nap, who knows when I'll be able to get up...


Well, need to put all my effort into this next day...then it'll be done. Finals week is so painful.
10:29 AM

 
Last day of classes for the term.

Very anticlimatic. Finished the paper that replaces the text for the final unit of 14.21. When he went over 5 papers in 5 classes, he didn't even get through them all, but the last unit was 4 papers in 2 classes. But the class was a good mix of medicine related stuff and economics.

Have a take home test for the third unit of 7.21 due on Monday. I also have my 5.13 final on Monday. This is a disaster. Take home tests give enough time that you want to be super anal and get everything perfect cause you know other people are. But then I need to allocate time to study for 5.13. It doesn't help that I was excused from Exam 4 since I was interviewing at BU.

Anyway...time is tight.
6:24 PM

 
Interview at Drexel Med today. I think it went well and I really like the place.

In fact, I've like Tufts and BU as well. I've liked all these places. I just feel comfortable there I suppose. I guess that shows that I'm heading in the right direction or something like that.
12:40 AM

 
First interview today. Tufts.

Very very nice. Very relaxed. I think it went pretty well. Two interviews.
7:37 PM

 
Oh right.

In other news, my IAP plans are shot...initially, my plan was to stay in Cali for all of IAP so I could hopefully have an easier time getting Cali med school interviews done. In response to airplane ticket pricing, I already bought tickets but don't actually have any interviews lined up. And now, I have a school on the East Coast asking me to interview right in the middle of IAP.

In other other news, I have a mock interview on Fri and a real interview next week. I feel weird doing mock interviews...I just can't act real.
12:13 PM

 
One test yesterday. Two tests tomorrow.

It sucks so bad. And I feel overwhelmed and subsequently totally unmotivated. So, two of my classes (5.13 and 14.21) have 4 tests and a final "thing" (test and essay, respectively). So, they somehow managed to be on the same schedule so everytime I have a 14.21 test, I have a 5.13 test two days later.

Unfortunately, this week, I have a worlds colliding issue where my class that has 3 tests in the semester, 7.21, is also testing this week. I saw this coming like a giant comet heading toward...err...another giant comet or something. Yet, I am woefully unprepared.
12:06 PM

 
I get it now. MIT wants us to build character.


1:58 PM

 
Got a big envelope informing me that I was approved for another med school interview. It's a school I would prefer to attend over the first school I got an interview at. It feels nice.

Almost done with all my secondaries. Hopefully more interviews are coming.
1:23 PM

 
UC Davis secondary app submitted with less than an hour to go. That's with the 1 month deadline they give and getting a 2 week extension since I was sick.

They have three 6000 character essays. That in itself is pretty much more than any other application I've done so far. I only have three more to go and I know they don't have that much either. But in addition to those three, they let you write six other optional 6000 character essays to describe one activity you did in each of six activity categories. That's 9 fricking 6000 character essays.

Fucking ridiculous.
3:21 AM

 
Finally, got my first Med School interview invite. It's a huge relief.

It's a huge weight off my back knowing that I have an interview. It's pretty crazy not knowing my fate for next year. It's almost debilitating sometimes.

Obviously hoping that more interview invites come but it's nice to know that not everyone rejected me already.
2:18 AM

home | links | media | archives

all © John Wu