Caught in Between

Wow, so it’s times like these that remind me why I love being at Hopkins. The last week has been an incredible blur, but fanastic none-the-less.

Last week Camilla’s little sister came for her college visits and interviews so I took her around Baltimore. We went out for delicious, delicious sushi and Thai food at “My Thai” (creative, I know, but you’ve got to love Mr. Vernon and the Peabody area). Then we got dessert at One World, it’s close to campus and they have delicious vegetarian and vegan food.

Friday morning I got to go see Dr. Ellen Ochoa, assistant director of NASA JSC, speak to students at a breakfast at the Hopkins Club. She was so great! So down to earth and SO smart. I’d like to be half as accomplished as she is, plus she’s spent close to 1000 hours in space, I’m so jealous! And she was the first hispanic woman in space, it never ends I could go on for hours. And I got to ask her a question about where she thought the future for astronaut selection for Constellation class missions would be going and if it would favor younger astronauts, so people of my age/generation…slightly self serving, I know, but I’m interested in medicine’s presence in the astronaut selection process, and who better to ask than the director of the astronaut office?

Then In lab that afternoon our lab had a visiing professor who is working with fruit fly stem cell centrioles and we had a round table discussion that I got to sit in on with our lab, Dr. van Doren’s lab next door, and our grad students and post docs. I’ll remember that forever, i got to be in the presence of greatness and mad scientific exchange.

Sailing was tons of fun, cold though, the weather has finally gotten cold but we kind of raced some UMBC kids that had set up a course on the water so that was a good time.

Oh!

But I almost forgot – on Thursday my friend Ari, who is really active in Hopkins’ Hillel, put on a guest speaker, Dr. David, to speak on a book I believe he is publishing soon on the “death of Israel.”  Personally I haven’t decided which side of that heated debate I’m on, but I decided after this summer I’d like to understand the issue better and get opinions from both sides.

I’m working on becoming more informed, it would appear that there are tons of resources all over this campus, and fantastic, knowledgeable professors. I think if I could do it all over again I would like to have mixed up the classes I took in my first two years a little more, less mad crazy science and more IR or intro to engineering classes…I’m starting to feel like though I know a lot about my specialties I would like to be better at being able to talk about foreign affairs.

Sure, I’m going to be a doctor someday, but that doesn’t exempt me from my duties as a citizen of my counrty and the world. (P.S. I mailed in my first presidential ballot on Monday!!! Everybody get out and vote. Voting and, less glamorously, paying taxes are your ONLY duties as a citizen of a democratic nation so really? We’re not asking much, exercise the right! Allright, that’s my soap box).

Anyway he gave a great speech, wither or not you agree with his stance it doesn’t negate how important it is to be well educated on both sides of an issue.

And, just to change it up a little, I went to a concert on Monday night at the Ottobar (about 3 blocks away from campus). Kathryn and I went to see a friend of hers who she went to high school with that just got signed to a record label and is on a crazy tour. It was great, it’s so nice to get off campus and I love live music is small venues…it’s something I don’t get to do as much now as when I was in high school but it’s nice to forget you’re a Hopkins student every once in a while and meet local baltimoreans/musicians.

Right so I should finish my reading for Colonial Latin America…I checked out 12 books from the library yesterday so I should get cranking on thie 20 pg. paper.

Jess, are you going down to Fells Point for Halloween? I’m thinking about doing a bobbing for apples at my house before going down…thoughts? Also Kathryn carved some mad pumpkins and we have pumpkin seeds to spare if you’d like some! Oh, and my friend Ted is coming down for Halloween so he and Daniel can be matching characters from Scrubs. What are you going to be?

Oh, and I JUST got the email: I GOT ACCEPTED INTO MY STUDY ABROAD PROGRAM FOR THE SPRING! It’s 100% official: I’ll be studying and interning in Santiago, Chile next semester!!! WOOOOOOOOOOT!

Hey guys!

So I’m stuck in the library for the day (actually that’s not true, I just volunteered at the Open House for 3 hours), but nonetheless I’m in the middle of my third semester here…meaning I’m REALLY caught in between.  The middle of the semester can possibly be the hardest part of the semester–the energy built up from the summer dies down and December seems far away.  Also, I don’t have a “hell week” this year, but I have three hard weeks in a row beginning this week filled with presentations, essays, and exams.  As you can tell, I really have my head caught up in academics (where it arguably should be all the time). Don’t worry, I have had some fun too!  Just last weekend I went apple picking and pumpkin picking!  Although that is definitely not as exciting as Roxi’s Fall Break.  But because my mind is stuck in academics world, I decided for this blog to talk about my classes this semester.

My classes this semester are all over the place.  They actually are all cross-listed with “Public Health Studies,” but to me they still feel mixed and because public health isn’t technically a department, they are all coming from different angles.

I begin my week with Environment and Society Towards Sustainability: “An introduction to understanding sustainability, with a focus on identifying and implementing solutions for a world of increasing needs and limited resources.”  This is a 10 person course offered through the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering and taught by an environmental economist, Professor Norman.  She gets us to part from our hippy ways and to try to understand why it may be important to put a monetary value on resources and to question if economic growth is really needed and if the world can really support us.  The readings all have very different opinions.

Recently, we began a sustainability project where we each picked a product and are now beginning to research if the product is really sustainable.  My product is a pencil case made by TerraCycle through reusing Caprisun packages.  Our products may eventually be sold at a sustainability kiosk at the med campus.  I have a midterm on Monday for this class, so I need to buckle down.

My second course of the week is Global Public Health Since WWII: “Globalization has dramatically reshaped the world economy, providing great advantages to some but leaving poor nations to struggle with hunger, disease and death on a daily basis.  This course explores the impact of globalization on public health in the developed and the developing nations since 1945.”  This may be my favorite course of the semester–although not my easiest.  It’s all offered through the History Department…somewhere I never thought I would be exploring.  I have learned information that I don’t think I would have been able to in other courses (information about the history of institutions such as the World Bank).  We also get the chance to read books like Jeffery Sachs The End of Poverty and now I’m currently reading The White Man’s Burden by William Easterly.  This course has me think about why exactly we haven’t been able to solve poverty, where we’ve gone wrong, and what the best approach we should take.

My third course is Population Health & Development: “This course will cover the major world population changes in the past century as well as the contemporary situation and projections for this century. Topics include rapid population growth, the historical and continuing decline of death and birth rates, the mortality transition, increases in contraceptive use, population aging, urbanization, population and the environment and the demographic effects of HIV/AIDS.”  I actually really enjoy this class and it has made me rethink what my interests are in public health.  I have always thought my interests were in the environment, but now I’m thinking I may also be very interested in Population, Family, and Reproductive Health.  Of course, everything is connected in the grand schemes of things, nevertheless I have really enjoyed this course.  It begins to raise questions for me–what should we do about population?  Is population really a problem?  What are the differences between the developed and the developing?

My fourth course of the week is The City in Time and Space: Historical Sociology of the Urban World: “This course will cover the past and current developments of urbanization from a comparative historical perspective examining how cities operate in the increasingly connected and complex world of today.”  This course is probably my most unique one.  It’s a 15 person class and is considered a “Dean Fellowship Course” through the Sociology Department (an emphasis that I’ve selected to have within my major) because it is not taught by someone that is officially a professor, but instead is taught by a graduate student that is super interested in the topic–and was able to receive the “fellowship.”  This course is super broad because we cover from the beginning of time to modern times.  But it makes me think, what really defines a city?  Why do we have them?  Should the West be our focus when looking back at cities?  And how do cities of today compare to those of the past.

>Lastly, I’m taking Environment & Your Health: “This course surveys the basic environmental health sciences (toxicology, risk assessment), current public health issues (hazardous waste, radon, water-borne diseases) and emerging global health threats (global warming, ozone depletion, sustainability).”  This course is a large lecture–even larger than it has been in past years–and is technically offered through the Earth & Planetary Sciences Department.  At first the information was very science-y–talking about biotransformation, bioactivation, and toxicodynamics.  But I’m glad that I now know about these processes.  However, we’ve moved on more “exciting” topics like nuclear energy and the World Trade Center’s impact on human health.  And yes, we learned that peanut butter can be thought of as a carcinogen–as we’ve discussed in the message boards.

One thing is for sure, by the end of the day, the information I learn in my courses doesn’t make me feel optimistic.  I learn about how many people are poor, how many people are dying through malaria, that every day things that I do increase my risk of cancer, that population is a problem on just about everything, and that the way I live isn’t environmentally friendly.  This is just something that has to be accepted as a public health major.  I know that my future will be directly or indirectly related to helping the third world.  But so many people have been trying to help, and we haven’t succeeded, and sometimes we’ve actually made it worse.  Other majors don’t experience this pessimism. Public health learning is different–so different than learning a language, learning organic chemistry, learning about film–I’m beginning to accept the implications the developed world has, the scars we’ve put on our environment, and the constant deaths that I cannot yet help save.  Public health, although thought of as a slower way of saving people than clinical health, is also a population approach.  This means that maybe we can be optimistic about it, since public health strategies in the past have saved thousands.

Well that’s all for now…expect another post in two weeks!  In the mean time, how are you Roxi?  Have you finished your study abroad application(s)?  And I’m sorry for changing your Facebook to pirate language, right now mine is set to English UK–I’m slowly learning 24-hour time…although isn’t your computer’s clock already set in 24 hours?  So maybe you’d like it!

P.S. If my fan from Connecticut (who talked to Admissions Daniel this week) is reading this, please comment!

Posted by Roxi R.

Dude Jess I really wanted to go to the parade, but I ended up going on a shopping adventure with Sam. I can’t wait to see your video though…BY THE WAY it took me forever to get my facebook off of pirate mode! (For anyone who wasn’t there, Jess switched my facebook into the pirate setting and I got skewered and people were writing on my plank for almost a week before some benevolent soul decided to take pity on me and change it back). What were you up to for Fall Break Jess?

Moving on, in reference to my title, so I’m not really an exPre-med, but these days it kind of feels like it. Lets backtrack some shall we? So this year, as a junior, it has always been one of my dreams to go study abroad, but as it would so happen, to do that as a pre-med and still graduate in time, take your MCATs, etc. takes a lot of forward planning and some intense semesters to get it all done in time (hence the insanity that was my schedule last year with Orgo+Biochem+Cell Bio).

However, I am VERY happily reporting now from the other side of the science conundrum and, well…lets just say this is Hopkins after all and though my classes haven’t gotten any easier, life as a humanities student is treating me really well.

First off I’m in a really neat class called Medical Spanish. Basically it’s Advanced Spanish…but on crack. Everything we do we learn in a health-care framework, so if we’re talking about grammer and imperatives, our in class practicals are to use imperatives to tell a patient what to do to avoid cancer. Or when we’re learning superlatives and comparison sentence structures, w talk about the hospitals in our home towns and how they compare to the Johns Hopkins Hospital and hospitals in Latin America and Spain. I love that I’m learning pertinent vocabulary for when I’m in Chile doing my internship, or maybe some day in the hopefully not so distant future, when I’m in another Spanish speaking country with Doctors without Borders. Plus the profe is really cool and the other day we watched a tele-novela modeled after General Hospital and had to name the devices we recognized in the patient’s room. So maybe it doesn’t sound that cool but I like it!

I’m also taking my first ever history course: Colonial Latin America, and boy has it been rough. So basically thus far I’ve taken intro classses, upper level sociology classes, writing classes, but never a class with a discussion section, and let me tell you, I was abysmally nervous the first couple of meetings. Basically there is the grad student TA plus about 10 students, but of those 10 I think 6 are international relations majors, and one is a senior working on his thesis, so he knows tons of European history (which is crucial to understanding the Spanish and Portuguese motives for conquest) and the other people can referece Roman mentalities in relation to slaves and Christiandom, and I’m sitting there just trying to keep up. At any rate, as the class has progressed I’ve gotten better at learning how to critically evaluate the readings for the class and follow the discussion and be able to make relevant (and sometimes insightful!) comments. It’s still a work in proress, but switching from analytical science mode to critical reading evaluation mode has kind of thrown my world upside down. I don’t have problem sets any more, I have historical documents, so learning how to to turn on the other side of my brain has been a slow (and sometimes painful process), but I’m feeling a lot better about the class with a couple weeks under my belt!

I’m also taking one of my last Public Health required classes: Biostatistics. I haven’t taken math in almost a year but so far I’ve actually enjoyed the subject matter. Instead of classical math where you’re trying to find the volume of a sphere (for what purposes? I’ll never know but my engineering friends tell me Calculus is clutch so I usually just take their word for it) we’re learning about how to set up effective studies and the professor will give us examples of different experiments that were run and their parameters and discussess why a cohort study can be more useful than a cross sectional study or why double blinding is so important to the credibility of your results. Even someone like me, who doesn’t like numbers, can appreciate a class like this that is actually pertinent to the real world.

Finally, my favourite class this semester is  a class called Ni de Aqui, Ni de Alla: An Introduction to Latino Culture in America. I cannot say enough good things about this class. The professor is absolutely incredible and I’ve never had to strain my brain to understand concepts the way I have for this class. Though we’re studying the Latino/Hispanic/Mexican/etc. experience in the United States, the question that we keep coming back to is “What does it mean to be an American?” and although it would seem obvious, the more texts we read for the class, the more I get confused about who I am. Basically this class has questioned everything I have been taught since childhood: “America is the land of economic opportunity/freedom/no discrimination”, “everyone has the same chances to succeed in America” and the hardest part for me personally is to reconcile the experiences of the group of people we study with those of my own. Am I not living the “American dream”? My parents came to this country and bought into the system of “American” ideals and now I, a woman and a non-white, am attending one of the best universities in the country and have never felt as if my race or gender has kept me from reaching my goals. Yet, that is in no way shape or form the experience of so many others, so what makes me so lucky and them unable to get out of their niche? Hopefully by the end of the semster I’ll have a better idea, we’ve still got a lot of culture and history to cover.

In addition I’m back working in my lab. This semester I’m working on a new project, looking into the theory of immortal stem cells by examining histones. Mostly I’m doing biochemical work but I couldn’t be happier. And soon we’ll have all of our constructs and start cloning flies with this GFP (green flourescent protein) gene on their testicular stem cells and I’ll try and post some up here. :) I know, my guy friends hate hearing about my research but its so neat! Plus those flies live fantastic lives, they get all the yeast their little hearts could desire and fertile females in a very small environment. Plus they weren’t going to live that long anyway, so might as well make the best of their time on Earth in Four Seasons style accomodations.

Wow this post got long fast…I’ve got to run, it’s only Friday and I’ve got a 3 day weekend ahead of me, so what does that mean? Reading, beautiful fall weather, and maybe apple/pumpkin picking…we’ll see what the weekend brings!

Hey guys!  I hope all of you have had a great start to your Fall.  I’ve been busy, busy, busy with a few things.  I started my research job at the School of Public Health just last week.  It’s at the Center for a Livable Future and I absolutely love it already!  I work ten hours between Monday and Friday, so I’m excited to head back on Monday.  I have also been volunteering more!  Just last weekend I volunteered at the Baltimore Book Festival.  And of course, I also spent Thursday night playing Palin Bingo with members of SAAB.  I definitely hope to write a blog with my collection of volunteer experiences and about how I managed to get research.  However, this weekend after having my first test of the semester, I decided to reward myself with a little adventure!

I headed off to the “Parade of Gold.”  A two-part celebration focusing mainly on welcoming back Katie Hoff and the AMAZING Michael Phelps.  The first part was a parade that I went to and the second part was a speech/fireworks celebration at Fort McHenry.  For those of you that don’t know, both of them are natives to the Baltimore area. I had no idea what to expect from an Olympian parade, but just the idea of finally being able to see Michael Phelps in person (after watching countless hours of him during my Olympic marathon in August), was convincing enough to get me to go.

Was it exciting?  Yes!  The streets were lined with thousands of people (lots of children with posters and Phelps shirts and even some wearing swim caps and bathing suits).  There was also tons of patriotism–you would’ve thought it was 4th of July.  Plus, we got tons of free stuff.  I got a free piece of pizza from a local pizzeria, an American flag, and a “Phelps Phan” poster.  The people that marched in the parade varied from

Congressmens and Senators to the Johns Hopkins Lion Dancing team, from a ROTC program to cheerleaders, from girl scout troops to motorcycle racers.

But then the cheering got louder! There came Debbie Phelps and Hillary Phelps, multiple local paraolympic champion, Katie Huff, and then…Phelps!  Phelps came surrounded by the National Guard on all sides.  Tons of staff made sure that we all gave some space, but still…he was just feet away from me!  He was standing up through the sunroof of a National Guard vehicle waving to the crowd.  Meanwhile I was videotapping all of this for our Hopkins Interactive video show (which will be debuting in less than a month!), while Matt was taking picture of Phelps–I’m so glad that he got such good pictures of him!

Overall, it was definitely one of my highlights at Hopkins.

I’m glad I was able to experience it with close friends.  Plus, not many people can say that they’ve been to a Michael Phelps parade, so I’m glad I crossed that off of my unique list of things to do while at Hopkins.

Anyway, I guess that is all on my end, plus it’s time for bed.  But Roxi, how was your weekend?  Was I (for once) more adventurous than you?  Have you changed your Facebook out of pirate language?  Knowing us, I’ll be seeing you in just a matter of hours (Sunday=library day).