What a $50,000/Year Eduction Looks and Feels Like!

I felt it was time I took some pictures of some of my weekly locations and class settings. I also wanted to give a quick summary of my feelings of my education so far in medical school. My educational experience here at PNWU has been amazing.  My class size is around 135 students.  Students are randomly assigned to smaller groups for clinics, labs, and other educational opportunities.  I receive adequate attention and time from professors to get my questions answered and obtain help I need for tougher classes. For example, Gross Anatomy Lab aka the cadaver lab places students in groups of four to dissect and study a cadaver.  I rotate each test block, every 4-5 weeks, between different bodies, lab sections (each have there own assigned professor), and groups of students.  This allows me to meet other students, learn from different professors, and see different cadaver body types. My other labs follow similar rotation patterns.  All in all, my teacher to student ratio is fair and manageable.  When I need help, which is not too often, a professor or tutor is just an email or hand's raise away from helping me.
As for the finances of medical school, do I feel my education is worth $50,000? I would prefer to reword the question and say should my education cost $50,000? Heck no!  All educational costs these days are extremely inflated and so many mismanaged institutions, including state and federal governement, are to blame it's not even funny. Nevertheless, I feel a medical school education is worth every penny because I want to be a physician.  I would pay more than $100,000 a year if it meant in the end I would be a successful and knowledgeable physician.  I have always wanted to be a doctor. Actually, I originally wanted to be a vet because I loved discovery channel, biology, and animals; then I learned that animals aren't as interesting as people. So technically I have wanted to be a physician since I was about twelve years old. The point is I have found what I am passionate about and so nothing will stand in my way of me doing what I want to do. Hailey, Olive, and I are poor, stressed, and happy.  We have God, food, shelter, and friends.  We are in pursuit of my/our dream and a life free of debt and full of happiness.  The journey will take while and we try to enjoy it through its ups and downs.  In the end the hard work will pay off.
Here are so pictures of my class settings I thought would be interesting. I hope it's legal for me to show them. If not I will remove them. Haha.

My Lecture Hall. Mon-Fri I am here 8am-5pm for the most part. Sometimes we have lab instead of lecture or have afternoon study time, but mostly we are in lecture. 

 My home away from home (study cubicle in study hall) 

BTW I am a hug flashcard guy and every four week go through about 300 flashcards

 Osteopathic Principles and Practice Lab

This is where I learn Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine, it's like chiropractic with different phylosophy and techniques

 This is Histology Lab.  Back in the day this was studied under microscopes. Now we use digital slides to study human cells and tissues.  My professor is drawing on the projection to explain what we are looking at.  Today we studied the female reproductive system. On my laptop is a slide of a fallopian tube cross section.

Failure Is Sometimes an Option!

Exam block 3 has come to an end. I left the exam block with my brain mostly unscathed. In all my years of education I have never had a series of exams that I felt the load of material was impossible to memorize or understand.  In the past, I had failed exams because of laziness or lack of dedicated study skills. Exam block 3 forced my brain to a level I never thought obtainable and in fact was not fully obtainable.  I ended up passing 7/9 exams. On the positive side, if that was a MLB batting average I would be batting .778, which is Hall of Fame material! I had to prioritize my time in order to fail the least amount of classes.  On average I feel most  of my peers failed at least 2-3 exams. I minimized the damage to my GPA by failing the exams in the classes where exams are weighted less.
Clinical Skills and Community Doctoring have participation points, reports, quizzes, and practical exams that buffer my grade for the occasional failed exam.
For another positive note I definitely improved my physiology grade.  Physiology is one of my favorite classes, but the exams are extremely stressful. The exams have around 50 minutes to answer 40 questions.  Sounds doable and it is, but physiology exams get my pits sweating every time I click the BEGIN button on that exam.  The reason physiology is so stressful is due to the fact that we have an amazing professor who loves to challenge us.  The questions she asks are pretty straight forward, but are multilevel questions.  So knowing a complete concept and not just parts of a concept is very important.  Our topics for this exam were about blood, circulatory shock, and heart disease.
Most of my other grades remained about the same, and I continue to get mostly B's and a few A-'s in medical school, which is well above my expectations of what I thought I would be able to accomplish.
Life is pretty good now that exam block 3 is over and Thanksgiving break is the light at the end of the tunnel.  After Thanksgiving break comes exam block 4 and then finals.  Medical school is definitely feeling doable, still stressful, but doable!
Immediately after the test block, Hailey and I headed to a small retreat with some ward friends, and also distant relatives.  We went to one of the LDS camps called Camp Zarahemla by Clear Lake, WA.  We roomed in a large lodge with 4 other families and had a blast playing games, eating good food, and relaxing on couches by a large wood furnace.  Olive was not the happiest camper that night.  We probably only got 4-5 hours of sleep on and off as she was waking up and thinking it was play time. She is going through a phase where she can't sleep if someone is in the room with her and she is waking up every 4 hours at night.  We're working on that. Here are some fun pictures of our adventure.