Tulane Pharmacology Masters

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 ...