pragone

This might be the first time in the 7 years I've my degree in it that someone has said they're actually "looking for bioinformaticians"...

> eople do not have to declare major for two first years in school. Outside those doing pre-med or pharmacy students do not need to take any hard science/math/cs classes ( the later in a lot of schools taught in math departments ) for years. Early juniors are the first ones who need to decide on a major and boy is CS low on that list ( why would one want to spend next two years cramming math, CS, and physics into the schedule class after class when one can take a few creative courses and graduate with liberal arts degree? ).

This is very dependent on your school and program. At my school, the engineers selected their specialty at the end of, I believe, freshman year. My program was so rigorous with specific requirements that if I didn't start them during freshman year, I could not have graduated in 4 years. As it stood, I missed a semester due to illness and was set back an entire year because of it.

See, I've had the opposite experience. I can't remember anything from the vast majority of lectures - I either make notes, which means I'm missing material while I'm writing, or I don't take notes, and don't remember much of anything at all. Lectures are nothing but a huge waste of my time.

Now, recorded lectures, on the other hand, are superior. Combined with the ability to directly contact the lecturer, it would be an infinitely more successful method of learning for me.

Perhaps the way forward is the way my medical school does it - 3 different pathways: lecture-based, problem-based, and self-study. Let each student choose the path best for them.

Yes, they invented the "problem-based learning" method/style, I do believe.

I would characterize that experience, instead, as very, very poorly implemented. A properly implemented "active learning" environment simply puts the impetus on the students to be pro-active. Whether that's buying outside materials, or requesting a lecture from a professor, or simply meeting with a professor to clear up misunderstandings, the students are the ones who start that process. Of course, that's all reliant on the students being informed of this process from the outset.

There should be some kind of structure, and I imagine, if there are exams, there is some kind of structure, for the students to be following. There should be required textbooks as well, so that resources are consistent.

And, of course, there needs to be unbiased feedback to improve the system.

Also, even lecture-based students spend thousands of dollars on outside material. And doing so isn't a "secret". At least $300-400 is spent by each medical student for the arguably "required" board prep materials, completely disconnected from how they learned in the first two years.

I am 29 now, and I'll be 31 when I graduate. I just started 3rd year.

If you're not familiar, after medical school (4 years), you have to complete a residency in order to become board certified. Residencies last anywhere from 3 to 6 years depending on the specialty. After residency comes an optional fellowship to further sub-specialize. Those can be 1-3 years.

I did EMS in college, so I had some patient care experience. I started working as a software engineer in Manhattan right after college. I was working 9-5 days, M-F in an office and just couldn't stand it. I missed being outside, and I missed being with patients.

I probably could have shopped around and found some place that worked well for me, but I just wasn't sold on writing software for a lifetime.

Edit: Let me add this: One of the biggest headaches I found in day-to-day life in the office was the lack of self-improvement. I missed being challenge not just with new material, but with what my colleagues were learning as well. There was no real drive for self-improvement in the officeplace, no real interest in spending anytime outside of work to learn and get better, and I missed that aspect of school and medicine.

I'll also say that I probably thought seriously about quitting medical school 30 or 40 times in the first 2 years. Now that I'm on rotation and actually interacting with patients full time again, I'm in love.

I'm in medical school

> Given the choice of having a father at home or have one dead in cave but famous for exploring cool places I don't think it's hard to guess what most children would pick.

In all seriousness, I do have a hard time guessing which one most children would pick. I can see reasonable arguments made on either side. Personally, I think it would be far more inspiring to have a father who died pursuing his passion, then one who gave it up to stay at home.

The problem is not medical school spots, it's residency spots. Having medical school graduates is useless if they can't get licensed or board certified.

Where is this for? I can't think of anywhere I've lived in the northeast (NJ, NY, PA) where this strongly applies.

Here's one: I live on a "Drive". It's road built through townhouse complex. Pretty much the exact opposite of what I'd call "long, winding road shaped by natural environments". It connects to a "court", which is another road through the complex that most certainly does not "[end] in a circle or loop – like a plaza or square".

Edit: "Road" isn't even on this list!

2nd Edit: I've consulted some traffic engineers. I'm genuinely curious to see what they say.

See if this helps: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xray/dgkdfehohjdbm...

Having studied both at this point, I'd agree. I think most of my learning in CS tends to be experimentation - write some programs, see why they don't work. Sure, there's some things you need to memorize and understand, but that knowledge is strongly reinforced through experimentation.

I'm using previously made cards by another individual.

A reddit user named brosencephalon when through First Aid* (2015 I think?) and made about 13000 Anki cards for everything in it. It's been extremely popular on the r/medicalschool subreddit, with multiple people saying they did well on boards as a result.

--

* First Aid: First Aid for the USMLE, published every year. It's basically the bible for medical students preparing for the board exams (namely, the USMLE, or US Medical Licensing Exam, of which there are 3 parts. The first one is taken at the end of the 2nd year of medical school.)

I don't have lectures, so I have the tedious job of trying to pick out the relevant material straight from the textbooks. Let's just say Bro's cards (https://github.com/enlightenedchampagne/Brosencephalon) is a real lifesaver. (Unfortunately my school tends to test some not-board-relevant material and also not test board-specific material, so it's hit and miss, but I've been doing alright so far.)

This is a fascinating subject that I've spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about, as I've continually tried to improve my studying habits in these first two years of medical school.

There's some great points here. One for discussion that I'd disagree with is copying your notes. Here in medical school, it's literally temporally impossible to copy your notes and actually get to all the material. It's definitely an extremely effective way to learn the material, but unfortunately when you have so much material in so little time, it's just not feasible (FWIW, an average semester has 25 credits of courses for me).

I'd also add in spaced repetition studying - this has been an extremely effective method of studying for me, and I've learned more via spaced repetition studying of previously made flashcards than I have from reading the textbooks. And it does a phenomenal job of isolating the material you need to know from what you already know.

> everything that can allow an app to give you a first diagnose before heading to the doctor.

Why do you want to have the diagnosis before seeing a physician? (I'm legitimately interested in the answer.)

In my experience, it's about 50-50 with helping versus hurting making the correct diagnosis and providing accurate treatment.

This is an excellent idea! Lyme disease has more uncertainty about it than most people realize.

> I'd suggest staying away from unstructured data and things that are primarily of interest to only the business side of healthcare--insurance figures, billing codes, EMR/EHR shit.

I would argue these are the most important areas to target. We need tremendous reform in this area, and if we can demonstrate meaningful improvement over what we have now, maybe we can let doctors get back to actually treating patients and not spending the majority of their time checking boxes on a computer.

> Given you have surgeon [x] what are odds of a successful surgery with [x]. THIS is the guarded secret -- yet the most valuable.

What is a successful surgery? One with the least complications? No complications? Shortest recovery time? Best return to function? Best outcome for that particular patient?

It's not an easy question to answer.

Someone posted on a similar thread yesterday or the day about something that would fit the bill for you. I'll see if I can find it.

Off the top of my head, I think they sold a router, mostly pre-configured with ddwrt, that you plugged in your info for PrivateInternetAccess and used them as the VPN. Could be wrong though.

Edit: Here's what I was talking about: https://easyvpnrouter.com/. May or may not meet your needs

Since this isn't posted in this thread yet, here it is: https://github.com/jlund/streisand

Unless someone can point out why it's not what it's cracked up to be? Seems like a rather easy-to-setup solution, somewhere between straight up paying a service and rolling everything yourself (I do pay PIA, but I've found that, not infrequently, my speeds are drastically throttled. I'll be actively downloading a file while connected at 400kb/s, cancel the download, disconnect from them, restart the same file, and be at 10mbit/s. I have no doubt some of that is due to the nature of the VPN, but I can't imagine all of it is. But, I'm not not a network engineer.)

I've taken it as a sign that 1Password must be a fairly good choice as I very, very rarely see it pop up on here.

You 100% hit the nail on the head. It's really, really amazing to see how absolutely disconnected the buyers and the users are.

I was doing training at one hospital where, when they admitted a patient to the floor from the ED, had to print out the entire EMR, because the EMR in the ED and the floor was not compatible. Insanity.

I've seen all of these situations thousands of times, and I don't even work in a hospital (yet). There has not existed a single EMR I've ever seen that makes any sense whatsoever to the individuals using it. I understand it from the bigger picture, but when things are directly impacting patient care, something needs to be done.

I've likewise been extremely interested in reforming EMRs. It's a precarious field to get into, but I am definitely very interested in pursuing it (perhaps after medical school, though).

> It feel like it helps me mark the time internally, and reminds me that I'm a pretty small part of nature overall.

You know, I don't think I ever consciously had that thought, but since you mentioned it - I think I wholeheartedly agree with the statement.

I did grow up on the east coast, and have, so far, lived my whole life here.

I would never describe the summers as "hellish" nor the winters as "ball-shriveling". I thoroughly enjoy the tremendous variety through all the seasons. I would say there isn't "1 week of pleasant weather", but rather, a year of tremendously varying, enjoyable weather.

But, of course, that's sort of the point - to each their own.

Literally one of the things I hated the most when I visited California and all I hear about California is the weather (I should say, "San Francisco", not CA, since obviously CA is a pretty big state). I can't imagine what living somewhere that is the same every day.

> And I was flabbergasted that no one I touched in the medical establishment had ever recommended it.

A very American problem. Speaking with some of my Canadian colleagues, recommendations for cannabis usage in managing pain and other conditions is much more frequent.

I can't seem to be able to log in - seems possibly due to a missing Mandrill API key. Given that Mandrill is apparently now a paid addon to mailchimp, how'd you get around this?