The New College of Medicine Building DLSHSI

How awesome is this? Brand spanking new baaaby! :))

5 floors of glorious awesomness. 

Panic Sets In

School tomorrow. 

I woke up today with an oncoming panic attack. I swear by the holy nose hair of Badjula that I just stood up from bed in a panic frenzy remembering that I'll be going back to the dorm and start a brand new week of med school.

Why was I panicking?

Because its a habit. Joke. Lol.

Some subjects were worrying me a whole lot--namely, Biochemistry, Physiology, and Anatomy.

Physiology- I can understand it, its pretty good, but the pacing is really, really fast. I'm having a little bit of a difficulty with the ions and whatnot floating in and out but, the sheer volume of stuff to study.

Next up, Anatomy. This is stressing me up a little bit because of the before lecture and after lecture quizzes that they have. Say goodbye to the 1/4 sheet pad papers that you leech off of your classmate because the professors in Med do it by bubble sheet.

Its 10 items, no erasures, they flash the questions on screen for 20-30 seconds per item. 

What's so stressful about this???

Out of the 10 items, you can only have two wrong answers to pass. Yup. 8/10 is passing. 7/10, your quiz is crap and you learned nothing.

In my time (nope, I'm not that old, I just like to talk like an old timer), 6/10 was the passing, and with the really nice, easily persuaded teachers, you can pass with only 5 items.

It would have been ok if I didn't  spend 3 hours on that one particular topic, but, what can I say, I think I may have gotten a 7/10. I'm still adjusting, trying to study a little bit faster, and a little more efficient. Holy Badjula knows I'm trying.

The professors/ doctors are really nice but absolutely strict, and I guess for good reason too. 

CHED dictates that if a student fails 40% of their load, they are automatically kicked of the roll. Meaning... you will be kicked out of the Doctor of Medicine program and will never be accepted into the DLSHSI Med Program. Ever. 

Guess what? Anatomy makes up 39.5% of the academic load in first year.

39.5%

So all you need is just one more subject (minor or major), anything to fill up that .5% that remains, and BOOM. You are taken out.

Every doctor-lecturer emphasized that. Every single one. 

Harsh, but its the truth. They said that around 6-10 students were not able to be promoted to the 2nd year because of failure in this one.

Good news is, if you failed JUST Anatomy, meaning you didn't fill up the whole 40%, you can still take up Anatomy next year. Yey!

Finally, Biochemistry. 

The doctor-lecturer was awesome, really nice. The topic? not so nice.

We were reviewing the basic (ahem ahem) concepts in Organic Chemistry. The doctor was assuming that all of us took this up in college and was going through the subjects like food goes through you during diarrhea.

My reaction to the first four slides was...

During the lecture, the doctor would ask, " Is everyone ok? Can everybody follow?"

And then some bibbo classmates would shout out in sing-song unison-- Yeeeeeeeeessssssssss Siiiiirrrrr. 

For those classmates, I would like to punch you in the face. Not. I just felt frustrated then. :)) It was extremely difficult to follow, and I would have appreciated it if the students who did get it would just quiet down a little and let the old timers like me struggle with a resounding " No Sirrrrrrr."

So now, I'm planning to study Organic Chem from scratch, while at the same time, struggle with learning Biochem and a bunch of ultra-toxic subjects. 

Fun. Fun. Fun. 

At the end of the Biochem lecture, students flooded the lecturer. One guy remarked,

"Sir, nawala po ako sa first few slides palang, wala na po ako naintindihan." 

~ Translation: Sir, you lost me at hello.

And the build up all these subjects led to the panic attack I had this morning.

My reaction to my future. I think it would be easier to walk into Mordor than pass these subjects.

Mmmmmmmmmmmm. Way to start the week.

To Study or Not to Study Before Med School?

To study or not to study. That is the question.

This came to mind when the last few weeks of freedom before med school started weighing in on my mind. And I was kind of worried. why?

Well, during enrollment, I was standing in line at the registrar's office and a bunch of teens were lined up as well as talking really loud.

One remarked, "OMG! You're 20 already??? You're sooooo old!"

And my reaction was...

And thats when I kind of panicked.

These  "kids" were in tip top shape. They just graduated from college, so their brains were in excellent condition to get beat up by a lot of medical topics and whatnot. PLUS, they graduated from courses that could actually help them with Medicine.

(Old versus young brain:)

Me? I graduated from a course that focused more of Psychology, Socio, and Anthropology. Its an excellent course, and I loved every minute of it, and it was a great help when I worked for 2 years. But for Med? Its an entirely different story.

Last November, I went to different med schools and had my transcript assessed for additional units I may need to accomplish. Med schools like Ateneo, Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila, and San Beda required a certain number of units in Physics, Chemistry, Biochemistry, Anatomy, Physiology, Inorganic Chemistry, and natural sciences. So that was around 16-20 units that I needed to take up if I wanted to get into the different schools.

And, as I wrote in my previous post, I didnt take up the extra units because of the Php 70,000.00 price tag on them.

So what chance do I have to compete in the killer world of Med where my classmates are young, fresh, and ready to kick some academic ass? I had a slim chance. But I could take some steps to prepare myself a bit...like study.

So, should I study the hard subjects in advance? Or just leave it to chance, and hope that in my first year of med, we would all start off  at a leveled playing field?

I asked several doctors about this, and they said that, even though the new graduates have an evident advantage, oldies, or late bloomers like me, have the advantage of being rested, and motivated.

Fresh grads are sometimes at risk of burn outs since they had just 1 or 2 months to rest, plus, like all normal human beings, within the span of 1 or 2 months, they can forget about 80% of what they studied that year.

Good point doc. I mean, every year I went in college, I usually forgot what I studied last sem and had to review them again.

Right now, I guess I'll just enjoy the time I have left, and just study my ass off when the time comes.

Med Books...Y U SO EXPENSIVE?!

UPDATES: hahahaha, instead of buying them brand new, you can buy them from the upper years, a lot of my classmates are selling their old books. :) 

you can also trysearching on sulit.com.ph for 2nd hand med books, i bought some of them online too, reliable rin yung mga sellers doon. :)

The book alikes are pretty expensive now that i think about it. And from my personal experience. Dont buy all the books just yet. Try to borrow books first and see which ones you like or are more fitting.

P.s. check my other post regarding which med books are usually used during your first year here. :)  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


I enrolled last week, and going through several of the buildings, I found myself in the basement of the research center, where a spritely woman was selling our med books.

She handed me a piece of paper with all the books listed on it, with corresponding prices and discounted prices.

Hmmmm. Short list. Not bad. 

Miss..how much all in all?

Wait a moment, I'll just compute it all. Dont worry dear, its all the books for the whole year.

Uh oh. The woman, even though she hadn;t computed it all yet, was already trying to justify the price...

Php 23, 600.00 lang po. 

Poker face. 

Ah, ok po, thank you. I'll come back during start of classes to buy the books. 

Not. I was shocked with the prices. Well, in all fairness, there were like, 10 books, so around 2k each. But I've never bought that many books that totaled that amount, ever. 

So I decided to poke around the internet, look for ebooks, or at least, 2nd hand books that could soften the destructive force that these books would create on my parents wallet. 90% of the books could be downloaded within the day. The other 10%, niet. 

Common sites like 4shared.com, Demonoid.me, and Torrentz.eu were pretty good at finding these little suckers. You can also try typing "download free med books" and a hundred or so sites would just pop up, and provide you with links to several useful med books. 

With torrent sites, you can just type med books, and several torrents are there for downloading. single books are at 20-100mb in size only, while others, the really good ones, are bundled up with about a hundred or so other medical books that are really useful like USMLE lectures, notes, colored atlases, pdfs, and other tidbits.

I found one seller on sulit.com.ph that sold black and white, photocopied versions of the book. at nearly half the price or so. Although its not advisable for some books like colored atlases for anatomy, physio, and neuro, its still a pretty good deal for other books that you just need to read. 

In sulit, they describe it as:

What's a BOOK ALIKE?

♥ Photocopied medical books, hard-bound, covered like the original one BUT are a lot cheaper.

You can read more about them here.

1ST YEAR BOOKS
	VOLUMES	PRICE
Devlin's Textbook of Biochemistry (7th ed)	1	P1520
Harper's Illustrated Biochemistry (28th ed)	1	P1210
Berne & Levy's Physiology (6th ed)	1	P1250
Langman's Madical Embryology (11th ed)	1	P930
Snell's Clinical Neuroanatomy (7th ed)	1	P1050
Moore's Clinical Oriented Anatomy (6th ed)	1	P1460
2ND YEAR BOOKS
	VOLUMES	PRICE
Robbins and Cotran Pathologic Basis of Diseases (8th ed)	2	P2350
Basic and Clinical Pharmacology - Katzung (11th ed)	1	P1500
Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine (18th ed)	3	P4460
Bates' Guide to Physical Examination and History Taking (10th ed)	1	P1350
Kaplan and Sadock's Synopsis of Psychiatry (10th ed)	1	P1680
Jawetz Medical Microbiology (25th ed)	1	P1250
Nelson Textbook of Pediatrics (18th ed)	2	P3540
Schwartz's Principles of Surgery (9th ed)	2	P2620
Goodman and Gilman's The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics (12th ed)	2	P2770
POCKET GUIDES/ COMPANIONS/ “BABY” BOOKS
	PRICE
Pocket Companion to Guyton and Hall Textbook of Medical Physiology (11th ed)	P700
BRS Physiology	P450
Schwartz Manual of Surgery	P1300
Robbins and Cotran's Pathology Pocket Guide( 7th ed, with markings from original book)	P700
Harrison's Manual of Internal Medicine 17th ed  (2vols)	P700
Sabiston Textbook of Surgery Pocket Companion	P1000
Kaplan and Sadock's Pocket Handbook of Clinical Psychiatry (5th ed)	P950

Compare the book alike prices with this:

Not bad for some, right? I was thinking of different options rather than just buying them all from school since they were all sooooo expensive. 

And so I decided to buy the important ones (as upper classmen advised, the books that are important, are the ones you will need when you review for the boards). so out of the 12 books there, I just plan on buying 6 or 7 of them, and, since I have the ebook versions of the others, I just plan on buying a lot of paper, some black and colored ink, and voila! print my own textbook. 

Why not do it for all the books? Well, it would be a b*tch to just print 1,000 pages. And especially if they;re colored with super detailed drawings of the human body, I cant afford to have fuzzy images mess up with my studying. 

So I plan to print 4 or 5 of the books, chapter by chapter, going with the flow of teaching at school, instead of printing them all in one day. From Php23,600, I whittled it down to Php 14,000. I already have the super fast printer, all I need is the ink, and ink just costs about 350-400 bucks a cartridge. Thank youuuuu HP for being so sturdy and cheap. 

How about you guys?

Med Schools...Eeny Meeny Miny Mo!

Like what I stated in my previous blog, I had four schools in mind:

1. UP
2. UST
3. UERMMMC
4. DLSHI

And again, I chose these schools because they were the only ones that didn't require extra units. I initially wanted to go to Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila (PLM) and Ateneo School of Medicine and Publich Health (ASMPH) but they were requiring me to take up additional units in Physics, Chemistry, Biochemistry, Microbiology, and some Natural Sciences.

I really did plan on taking them up, and I went to several schools/universities within our area to see if they all the subjects were available to be taken up for the 2nd sem of their school year. I was lucky enough to find one school, University of Perpetual Help for it.

The campus is big, and spacious, new buildings, and the admissions office was very accommodating. I took their entrance exam, which was about 20-30 minutes or so, and I was then admitted. Since I required about a sem's worth of units, I had to go through several different departments and choose specific classes to get into. What really struck me with this school is how awesome and helpful the professors were there. They personally escorted me to the different colleges and spoke with the other deans of the college, and even gave me tips on which subjects were better to take up to prepare me for Medicine! Wow lang talaga. Hahahahaha. Their college of medicine wasnt bad either, all the professors are from UP Medicine/ UP Public Health (which is similar to MedTech) and their facilities are topnotch!

So I was pumped, ready to take on those extra units, and just get into the whole I'm-gonna-be-a-doctor mode.The day of enrollment arrived, and I went to their auditorium to start choosing my subjects. Pretty simple enough. I was able to get all the subjects, and a great schedule.

Then...the hard part.

I had to have my subjects assessed, and boy, was the line long. I finished around 11am, and ran to the line. It stretched around 3/4 of the quadrangle. Good thing there were chairs, but, sitting/standing in the heat at noon is not something to laugh about. After 7 hours of waiting, I finally reached the assessment room. A student took my schedule and printed out the cost. Unfortunately, one of the subjects hadn't been encoded yet with the proper amount so they sent me up to another room where I waited for another hour or so where a woman was shifting through papers looking for my subject. While waiting, I glanced at the partial cost of my 6 subjects...and my jaw dropped. It amounted to about 60k (well, it was kind of understandable since 3 of my subjects were lab), that cost more than my 4 years in college!!! I didnt know that that amount was perfectly normal for private schools. T_T And to think, I still lacked 3 units on top of that, so it was going to amount to about 70k or so in its final assessment.

And it came to pass, that at 9pm, I headed home, and told my parents that I wasnt going to take up the extra units. I reasoned that the 70k could instead be used to pay for at least half of my 1st sem in Med School. They still offered to let me take up the additional units just as long as I was sure that I wanted to get into PLM or ASMPH, but with parents approaching the retirement age, I thought better of it to just let it pass, and focus on other schools.

Such a shame really, that I bothered all those professors, and they were sooooo nice. :( Oh well. Sometimes things dont work out the way you planned them.

So back to the 4 schools that I enumerated earlier. Again, UP wasnt an option anymore since my NMAT score was below their requirement, and then I had to cross out UST (due to a very unfortunate incident), and then I was down to UERMMMMC and DLSHI.

Both schools are very good, but based on forums and the general opinion, UE is more established in terms of their Med school (around 60 years, I think) compared to DLSHI, which is fairly young (30 years or so).

DLSHI had a fairly easy  application process. Pay Php600, fill out their application forms and bring the necessary documents. Since I passed it around December, I had to wait until January for the interview. The interview took about 30 minutes where the Director for admissions, Dra. Tesoro I think, asked the usual questions --Why do you want to take up Medicine? How will you finance your studies? How do you handle stress? and others. They said that in a week, I'd know if I was accepted. By the very next day, I received the acceptance letter through email and I just had to pay the Php 5000 reservation fee.

Oh but wait, I still had to wait for the results from UE. Grrrr. That would be in the next month, and I was kind of scared to lose my slot. So I decided to wait.

What really attracted me to DLSHI was the generous scholarships for those who graduated with honors. Although UERMMMC also had one, DLSHI's was guaranteed once you enrolled.

Well, of the four schools, DLSHI was by far the most expensive one in terms of tuition. But with the scholarship, it became the one I could most afford without getting my parents bankrupt.

DLSHI and UERMMMC had what they called, the Entrance Scholarship. For DLSHI it is providing 50%, 75%, or 100% scholarship for those who graduated as cum laude, magna cum laude, and summa cum laude. UE also has a similar scheme but based on forums at Pinoy MD, they said that only 30-40 students in total, get the scholarship, whilst in DLSHI, all those who applied, regardless of the number, just as long as they fulfilled the requirements, they could get the scholarship.

Oh, before I forget (being a scatterbrain and all), here's some info about each school

UP:
- NMAT Cutoff: 90%-95%
-No. of students accepted: 160 (40 slots are reserved for Intarmed students)
-Tuition Per Sem: Php56,000
-Has an interview
-Application Fee: Php 1,000

UST
- NMAT Cutoff: 70%-80%

-No. of students accepted: 400

-Tuition Per Sem: Php102,000 (last I checked, and they increase every year by 4-7%)
- Has 2nd level exams (MCAT)
-Application Fee: Php2,000

UERMMMC
-NMAT: 70%
-No. of students accepted: 300

-Tuition Per Sem: Php96,000
-Has an interview
-Application Fee: Php1,600

DLSHI
-NMAT: 40%
-No. of students accepted: 310
-Tuition Per Sem: Php106,000 (and they increase by 3-7% annually)
-Has an interview
-Application Fee: Php600

Gotta cut this post short, gotta rush. Arghhhh, will continue. :))

Choosing a Med School......dundunduuuuuuuuun

Ok...now we're getting somewhere.

I took up the NMAT last December 4, 2011, and I have say...two months of studying on your own will not prepare you at all. Well, it was pretty difficult for me since I had no background at all in the hard sciences. A whole day of feeling dumb, sleepy, and hungry, in a cold room with a thousand other students vying for those top  spots that can admit them to any school in the country.

By 5pm, the test was done, and I was ready to go home, my stomach turned upside down with dread because I knew that my score wasnt too good, but I did my best.

Anyways, after 1 week, the results were out. Tadaaaa! My results werent that bad, somewhere in the middle. The lowest score I got was in Biology (that was cruel sonofa-----). But its all good, the scores were good enough for me to qualify for several good schools.

I applied for the following schools:
1. UP College of Medicine

2. UST Faculty of Medicine and Surgery

3. University of the East Ramon Magsaysay  Memorial Medical Center (UERMMMC)

4. De La Salle Health Sciences Institute (DLSHI)

I applied specifically to these schools because they were the only ones who  didnt require additional units. I actually wanted to apply to St Lukes, PLM, and Ateneo School of Medicine and Public Health, but there were waaaay to many units lacking on on my part (lets just say that it would have taken from 16-26 units of hard sciences).

Well, after seeing my score, I knew UP was out of the question. Hahahaha. But there were other equally great schools to go to.

I was actually tormented with which school I would actually go for, even though their results weren't out (or even starting), I just wanted to set my mind on a specific goal. It always helps to set your mind on a specific school so that your thoughts arent all over the place.

Anywho, after finding myself lost, hopeless, and all over the place, I asked advice from my cousin who is practical, objective, and methodical when it comes to decisions (being the manager of one of the largest fast food chains, she was trained to be that way).

She told me: when deciding on something, I use a 5 point system. I list all the factors that I can think of that would have bearing on my decision. In my case, which med school should I go to? Well, the factors that I listed were (and in no particular order):

• Location
• Accessibility
• Tuition
• Availability of Scholarships
• School reputation (yes, Im still a sucker for this one)
• Safety
• Availability of Dorms
• Dorm costs
• Environment inside the school (is it conducive for learning?)
• Professors
• Affiliated hospitals
• Board Passing Rate

And under each school, I rated them between 1-5 (1 being the lowest, and 5 being the highest). And voila! an objective decision made.

My cousin also told me that if it still seems a little too subjective ( in terms of rating), I should list down facts to support the score/rating against each criteria.

Well, hope this helps you with your decisions!