Tulane Pharmacology Masters

The penultimate month of this Masters program primarily consisted of studying and studying and some more studying. We had to compile all the information we had learned from the year in Medical Pharmacology for the NBME Shelf Exam. As painful as that process was, I believed that the exam was actually quite confirming. It helped me believe that when I take the exam for real in a few years in medical school, I have the capability to do well on it! Now that I said that of course I will get back a terrible score on the exam... as it always goes. Even though this has signified the end of Med Pharm, I still have been busy studying for the MCAT next month. As the date approaches, I get more and more anxious about how successful I will be on this attempt. I believe that this is the final piece I need for my application to medical school (which honestly puts more pressure on the date). But a friend of mine told me to approach the test as an opportunity to succeed rather than a do or die which I ...

This month brought about the final two blocks of the year for Medical Pharmacology and Principles of Pharmacology. Neurology and Psychiatry were the final two topics discussed before heading into the final NBME exam at the end of March. I particularly enjoyed the Psychiatry block because of the light it shed on mental disorders. As I learned about the positive and negative symptoms that people with depression, schizophrenia, and other disorders, I felt a sadness growing within me. Millions of people worldwide struggle to cope with these issues on a daily basis yet so much is still unknown about these diseases from their causes to a proper treatment protocol. And the little aid we have for patients incurs such drastic side effects that make life even more difficult for any and all affected. These patients suffering from psychiatric disabilities are left to choose between fighting with their disease every day or tolerating the brutal side effects that accompany any drugs given to them to...

Fittingly,  the new year and semester brought on a bout of new classes to schedules. In addition to the usual Medical Pharmacology and Principles of Pharmacology classes, we are now taking Environmental Signaling, Endocrine Pharmacology, Cell Control Mechanisms, and Neuropharmacology. For the most part, these electives have given us more freedom to control how much we learn and what content we focus on. While the other electives still focus more on the human mechanisms, Environmental Signaling provides a good balance between physiological phenomena and environmental awareness. We have learned about the signaling pathways of estrogen in the body, the different forms of estrogen, and how they affect the body, but what I also appreciate is Dr. Mielke's attention to protecting New Orleans' population from lead pollution. We have been assigned a project to collect five soil samples from across the greater New Orleans area specifically from places where children spend a significant a...

Even with a week spent with my family in Nashville, TN, November still proved to be a heavy load from an academic perspective. We dove into the second half of the Cardiovascular (CV) block to begin the month and examined how to treat arrhythmias, benign prostatic hyperplasia, erectile dysfunction, and urinary tract infections. The antiarrhythmic overview was particular insightful as we tackled the topic in a problem based learning (PBL) exercise. By engaging each student in a discussion format, PBLs are effective at helping the students not only learn about how to handle arrhythmias but also gain an understanding of how their peers approach each case study. I believe this is an important skill to have as aspiring physicians because soon we will have to treat patients as a team, and its imperative to be able to combine multiple angles at a diagnosis to develop a personalized, appropriate treatment plan for each patient. Thanks to the generosity of Dr. Elma LeDoux, we also had the privil...

Another month has flown by, and my appreciation for doctors bringing hope and life to patients swells everyday. The number of drugs, drug interactions, mechanisms of action, and any information that could complicate a patient's recovery are just a few components of what doctors must have mastered to be able to safely treat their patients. So far we have built upon the foundation established during the Basic Principles module with more common diseases like heart failure, cardiac arrhythmias, and many others with the ANS and CV/Renal modules. The ANS module has been particularly exciting as it has given me a new perspective on the vascular surgery research I have been a part of over the last three years at Vanderbilt Medical Center. There we have been attempting to develop a method to prevent vein graft failures after bypass surgery and determine the best solution to store veins during surgery. We also focused a lot of our research on the endothelial-dependent vasodilation of smooth ...

New city. New faces. New academic challenges. As excited as I was to have finished my undergrad at Pomona College in small, suburban Claremont, CA and continue my journey to becoming a doctor, I was just as terrified to be moving to New Orleans where I would no longer be surrounded by friends and family to help me adjust to the new lifestyle. Tulane's Masters in Pharmacology would be an immeasurable challenge, but it is the perfect introduction to the material I would begin to learn in medical school. What stood out to me that was different than anything else I had been advised so far was that my dream of being a doctor was very much within grasp. Hearing doctors and professors show me a path to medical school was still possible even with a sub-par GPA filled me with a sense of hope and motivation to dive into the program head first. As we opened the Inflammation block with signal transduction, cytochrome P450 mechanisms, and other basic principle topics that had caused me so much ...