The beginning of the end

So two weeks ago it was match day over at the medical school.  That's the day when all of the fourth-year medical students find out where they've been matched for residency.  The medical school gets everyone together in Dunlop Auditorium and calls each person who's matching up one by one to receive their envelope.  Inside that envelope is a single sheet of paper.  On that paper is the place they're be spending the next 3-7 years for residency.  It's an exciting afternoon filled with lots of yelling and cheering and hopefully not any tears.  I attended the ceremony to celebrate with my classmates, and it was great but somewhat bittersweet.  I thoroughly enjoyed celebrating with my friends, and was very happy for them, but since I wasn't matching (I would have matched this year, but took an extra year to complete the masters in education), it was a little tough.

 That ceremony was the beginning of the beginning of the end that has marked these last two weeks.  It was when it became official that come June, many of my friends would be moving on.  The same goes for the friends I've made at GSE (though not in as dramatic fashion), they too will be moving on when all our programs end in the middle of May.  While many of my friends (both med and ed) will be staying in Philly, many won't be, and the nature of those relationships will change.

I've also been working furiously on my Masters Paper these past two weeks.  It's due April 8th, and marks another end for me.  I've been working on it since I started at GSE in August.  I've got 43 pages of blood, sweat and tears on mannequin simulation-based medical education.  I hope I'll be happy with the end result (and with some help be able to publish it), but it's another ending of a major part of my life over the last 8 months.

On Tuesday, I had my final meeting with Alyssa D'Alconzo to wrap up the Alumni Interview Program (for which I was the coordinator).  I handed her the instructions I had made for next year's coordinator and showed the power point of the results of the program.  Although it will be sad to no longer draw a pay check, the final numbers look pretty impressive. 

Yesterday was the Accepted Masters Student Preview Day.  Kudos to Lindsey and Rhiannon for planning an awesome event.  I spent the morning on the New to Philly Panel, ate lunch with some prospective TLL students, and then gave tours all afternoon (for any of you who were wondering, I did lose my voice by the end of the third tour).  While the day was a blast, it struck me around lunchtime that these were the people who were going to be replacing me.  Someone new will be filling my role as TLL's GA in the admissions office (and keeping you informed with their blog), a new batch of people will start fresh in the fall taking Foundations of Teaching and Learning (who knows, maybe someone will even learn how to rock climb for that class...). 

Tonight, sadly, is my friend Christine's last night in Philly.  She's heading to Guatemala for six weeks before coming back for a few days for med school graduation.  We're having a little potluck (in a few minutes) to celebrate, but it'll be sad to see her go.

Racing

So, it's spring time (though today it felt like summer...88 degrees in March...wow), and spring time means running outside (actually that's not totally true either, in Philly - at least for me - basically summer is the only time I DONT run outside.  The winter is usually mild enough that running outside bundled up is totally do-able.  The summer on the other hand gets a little hot and humid for my running taste).  Enough with the digressions, I haven't written much about my running in this blog (in the fall I was so focused on climbing that it sort of fell by the wayside), but I have a few cool races coming up, so I figured I'd blog about them.

The first race I'll be running is what I like to call a team relay ultramarathon.  Basically me and 11 of my med school classmates (well, actually 8 of my med school classmates, plus one of my classmates girlfriends and two of her friends - I'm going off on all sorts of tangents in this blog) will be running from Los Angeles to San Diego in a ragnar relay (http://www.ragnarrelay.com/race/southerncalifornia).  It'll be the third Ragnar I've done (there will be five of us running this one who have done all three).  The first one we ran was the Ragnar Las Vegas in October of 2009, where the race wound 181 miles through the desert, finishing at Red Rocks Casino in Las Vegas.  Then our clinical rotations threw a wrench in training, so our next one wasn't until we conquered the Ragnar Florida Keys which meandered 199 miles from Miami to Key West in January of 2011.  This April we'll be running Ranar SoCal. 

The way Ragnars work is it is a relay race that Ragnar has divided into 36 unequal legs.  Twelve runners on each team run it as a relay race.  You rent two 12 or 15 person passenger vans.  Runners 1-6 are in Van 1, and Runners 7-12 are in Van 2.  Van 1 begins the race, and runner 1 runs leg one, hands off to runner two etc with Van 1 drives along, providing support for runners 1-6 (giving them water along the way).  The two vans meet up when Runner 6  (from van 1) hands off to Runner 7 (then van 2 is the active van, and van 1 can drive to the next major interchange where Runner 12 will hand off to Runner 1 (who will be doing leg 13).  Each runner runs 3 legs of the race.  Your team runs continuously until they finish the race (our last two both took us around 24 hours).  I'll be Runner 2, so I'll be running leg 2 (5.1 miles), leg 14 (8 miles) and leg 26 (7.4 miles) for a total of 20.5 miles.  The last two Ragnars have been two of the most intense things I've done in my life, but also two of the most fun. 

The next race I'll be running is the Broad Street 10 miler in Philadelphia.  I've run this race twice before (in 2008 and 2010).  Basically, it's a race hosted by Independence Blue Cross in Philadelphia each year.  Each May they close down Broad Street (which is a major street that runs right through the heart of Philadelphia), and 30,000 runners run the 10 miles from just north of Philadelphia to the Naval Yard just to the south.  There are a ton of people in the race, but even more than that lining the streets cheering.  It's really an awesome race.  I'm very excited for it.

The final "race" I'm running is the Rugged Maniac 5k.  While it's only a 5k, there are 18 obstacles put into the race from army crawling through mud to climbing a rope over a 10 foot wall.  I've never done anything like it, but it looks like a blast.  Check it out, this race still has availability (http://www.ruggedmaniac.com/). 

Spring Break Photo Tour

Pictures from Seattle:

Day 1: Duck Tour, Space Needle

View of the Olympics from Space Needle

Lindy and I on the Duck Boat

Observation deck of the Space Needle

Restaurant at the top of the space needle

Ernie on the Walk at Discovery Park

Day 2: Discovery Park

Lighthouse at Discovery Park

Day 3: Pikes Place Market and Ferry to Bainbridge Island

Seattle skyline from the Ferry

Wine Tasting on Bainbridge Island

Lindy and her brother on the Ferry

Pike's Place Market

The Original Starbucks

Lake Tahoe

Day 1: Sunset on arrival

Day 2: Learning to Snowshoe

Day 3: Heading out to the Wilderness

 

Day 4: Gondola to Top Of Heavenly Village

Day 5: Sunrise on leaving

San Francisco:

San Francisco

In anticipation of spring break

So before I get into the blog post for the week, I wanna make a few GSE admissions announcements.  First of all, if you’re an admitted masters student in the majority of programs, try your best to get to the admitted masters student preview day on March 30th.  It’ll be a great opportunity to get your housing, philly, Penn, financial aid and program specific questions answered (there’s time for you to meet with the faculty of your program to ask all your questions about how the program works, what jobs students typically get when they graduate etc.).  For the Higher Ed program, your preview day is March 18-20.  For info on how to register, Click Here.  There are also some accepted students preview events planned in Atlanta (3/11), Los Angeles (3/12), San Francisco (3/14), Miami (3/20) and Boston (4/4).  There are also webchats on 3/13 (LGBT students), 3/27 (international students), and 4/12 for accepted students.  For more info on these go to this link. 

Now on to the blog post. 

One of the glories of being a graduate student (as opposed to being a medical student) is that I once again get a spring break.  While gone are the days of heading to the DR for an all-inclusive resort, down to Miami for some fun in the sun, or on a cruise (shout out to SB2K6), I’ve still got a pretty great one planned.  This break I’ll be heading off on a three-city ten-day trip with my girlfriend. 

The first stop on this three-city tour is Seattle.  I haven’t been since I was very young, (six or seven).  I’m definitely excited to return, I’ve always thought it’s a city I might like to live in (don’t worry Mom, it’s, as of now more of a fantasy), so I’m excited to explore it.  The purpose for our visit is to spend some time with Lindy’s brother.  He lives in Seattle and his job prevents him from making it back to the east coast all that often.  I’m excited to meet him, his girlfriend and their dog and get to spend some time with them.  His girlfriend has a fun weekend planned where we’ll be checking out all the sites.  Given that Lindy and I are huge coffee fans, we’re both super psyched to taste what Seattle has to offer.  I’m also excited to get a feel for the vibe of the Pacific Northwest (and hey, seeing the beautiful scenery won’t hurt either). 

The next stop on our vacation is South Lake Tahoe.  We found an amazing deal on Living Social ($260 for four nights – that’s total, not per night – at the Tahoe Beach and Ski Resort), so we’re going to fly from Seattle to San Francisco, rent a car and drive out there.  I’ve never been to Lake Tahoe, but I’m suuuper excited to see it.  It’s supposed to be spectacular.  Since I don’t know how to ski (never learned, though it’s one of the three things at the top of my life list along with surfing and sailing) we’re gonna do some snowshoeing

The final stop on our tour is a day in San Francisco.  One of Lindy’s good friends moved out there this past fall, so we’re going to spend the day hanging out with her, catching up and getting a small glimpse of SF (I’ve never been there for any length of time either). 

I’ll do a post-trip photo (and maybe video) blog. 

Synagogues

I'm not a particularly religious person, though I identify very strongly with being Jewish.  For me, Judaism is more than a religion, its a culture.  Many of the Jewish practices I perform I do more because they are what my family did rather than for their religious implications.  That being said, there is something very cathartic about hearing familiar prayers in a synagogue.   I don't mean this as being proselytizing, I'm sure Christians feels the same way in a church, and Muslims in mosques, because it's more the familiarity and sense of history than anything else.  Having now lived in five different cities in my adult life, I've been to a number of different Jewish services.  Each time, I'm struck by the differences between the services.  I wrote a little bit about it this past fall when my family attempted to go to a new temple for the high holidays. 

This weekend I went with my girlfriend to North Carolina for the one year anniversary of her grandfather's death.  We went to her uncle's synagogue for the yertzeit Friday evening.  The service was beautiful.  I actually found that they used many of the same tunes that the synagogue I grew up at used.  There were definitely some differences, and some tunes that, even though I knew the words, I couldn't pick up the tune.  What is always reassuring is that no matter how different the service, the alieot and the aleinu always have the same tune.  Hearing them transports me back to my childhood.

Like I mentioned, there's just something very peaceful and cathartic about being in a synagogue and hearing familiar tunes, even if the synagogue itself is unfamiliar. 

Old Friends and New Beginnings

 

So last winter two of my college friends and I started a new tradition.  In December 2010, we rented a cabin in Tamworth, NH and brought our girlfriends along for a weekend of day hiking, sitting by the fire, cooking and enjoying each others company.  This year due to scheduling issues, our weekend getaway was postponed to be an early Valentine's Day getaway, and we couldn't quite travel back up to the White Mountains (it was a bit too long a drive for us since my girlfriend didn't get off of work until 5 on Saturday).  Instead, we decided to meet halfway between where they are (Boston), and us (Philly).  We settled on New Haven, figuring we could relive some of our college glory.  We rented a beach house on the Long Island Sound in Milford, CT and the six of us met there to enjoy each others company.

In the time between our last weekend getaway, both Will and Laura (my two college friends) have gotten engaged to their girlfriends, so this was also a little bit of a belated celebration of Will and Rachel's (his fiance) engagement (Lindy and I had gone up to Boston to celebrate Laura and Meg's engagement last fall).  I picked Lindy up at work on Friday and we drove up to Milford, a drive that went surprisingly smoothly considering we were going during rush hour traffic (if not for getting turned around a bit when we got off the highway for gas and dinner at Edison, NJ, we would have made the trip in about four hours).  We got up there and Will and Rachel arrived moments later (Laura and Meg were coming up Saturday morning).  We enjoyed a wonderful evening toasting their engagement with some champagne and catching up.

The next morning, Will and I prepared breakfast (scrambled eggs, hash browns, chicken sausage and bacon) and the four of us enjoyed a lazy Saturday morning drinking coffee and enjoying the light snow that was falling.  Laura, Meg and Thiery (their dog) arrived at around noon, and after a bit of catching up (and letting Thiery swim in the ocean to tire him out), the six of us went for a wonderful walk on the beach.

That evening was when we had the real festivities planned.  We had a reservation at Mory's, which is a restaurant in New Haven that is a members only club which basically strives to be stuffy, old, and traditional Yale.  When you go there on certain Saturday nights, you're bound to be serenaded by an acapella group.  The tables are well worn wooden tables with years of Yalies carving their names into them, and gentlemen are still required to wear a sports coat and collared shirt to enter.  While the food is overpriced, what makes Mory's so special is the toasting sessions.

They will sell you a trophy cup filled with a mixture of different alcohols and juices that you order by the color.  We first ordered the Gold Cup (Champagne, Triple sec and Orange Juice).  The way the session works is when you have the cup, you make a toast and drink from the cup.  There are other rules as well: if you're holding the cup and someone tells a story about you, you must continue drinking until the story is finished, if someone sings a song while you're drinking from the cup you must continue drinking until the song is done, if you let the cup touch the table you buy the next cup and so on.  They're old Yale traditions, and enabled our girlfriends/fiances to hear all about our college glory (as well as some not so glorious moments).  We drank two cups, had a wonderful time, instilled in Rachel, Meg and Lindy some of our Yale traditions and then headed back to Milford for the night.

In the morning, we woke up, Will made some breakfast burritos and then Laura, Meg, Lindy and I set off for New Haven since Meg had never been given a proper Yale tour, we decided to oblige.  We also met up with one of Laura's college roommates, Laurel who is getting her Ph.D at Yale in Art History, so got to catch up with her as well.  We then returned to the beach house to do some grilling for lunch before heading back to our respective cities. 

Overall it was a wonderful weekend filled with great friends, regaling in old stories, and getting excited for some new beginnings.  Hopefully it's a tradition we'll continue each year.