Finally starting, wait there’s tests? || MSAP Week 1

Hey! If we haven’t met yet, my name is Rainee. I’m a non-trad accepted to St. George’s University in Grenada in the Caribbean. Well, sort of. I have to pass the MSAP course first.

Week 1 out of 5 is done!

I’d rate difficulty at 6.64/11.

I’m grateful to be participating in St. George University’s (SGU) MSAP (Medical School Assessment Program). My cohort has a 5-week course and about 30 hours per week of a mini-medical school. The course is offered completely remotely. In my orientation emails, the staff said the goal is to see if you can head straight into Term 1 (the first semester) or if you need an extra semester before Term 1.

They release a week’s worth of lecture recordings for us to review on our own time. There are also optional discussion classes on Friday and Saturday. Then we have our weekly quizzes on Sunday. The staff has emphasized the course is meant to assess the student’s ability to learn.

I graduated from UCI with a psychology degree but also completed the bulk of my pre-med classes there. Unfortunately, I was pretty unfocused on being certain about what I wanted to pursue. Going after medicine really scared me! I started off as a biology major there. I remember my first meeting with my major’s counselor. She told me that I better think of other options because she didn’t think I had what it took. I took a year after I graduated to work and pay off my school loans. Then for the next 3 years, I finished my prereqs while studying for the MCAT and working. I was really proud of my MCAT score, but my past at UCI really haunted me. I can talk about this more later, but I decided to apply to the big 4 Caribbean schools. After interviewing with them, I really felt I had the best chance at coming back to the US with SGU. They offered me an invite into the school with the exception of passing MSAP.

It was tough to dust off my brain and remember how to use it and then manage my time. Want to spend exuberant amounts of time watching K-dramas or 90-day-fiance? Nah, no time. It was recommended to be solely doing the MSAP program. I wish I could afford to take time off for this, but I have to continue working as a scribe to pay my bills (San Francisco ain’t cheap!). Even so, I hope to maintain the routine that makes me human, like exercising a 4-5x week and dedicating time to being present as a girlfriend and dog mama.

Life this week:

After 5 to 6 years of braces and then defying the need to wear retainers — I’ve bought $1800 clear aligners through Byte. It’s 12 weeks of mild discomfort and speaking with a lisp. I could do without sounding like a dweeb in my mid-20’s, but a straight smile is worth is what I said.

MSAP Week 1:

This week was like every intro of every prerequisite premed class I’ve ever had, just crammed into one week. It seems the course is organized into Anatomy and Biochemistry parts. For anatomy this week, we rediscovered cell anatomy. Biochemistry is always so painful for me, but it included a lot about enzymes, DNA/RNA/protein basic, blah. Each part had about 6-7 video lectures around 4-30 minutes long. Thank sweet baby Jesus, I could watch them in 1.5x.

Schedule

My goal is to outline and prep my notes based on the given learning objectives starting Sunday and Monday. Learning objectives are given as a list of full-length sentences describing concepts to be understood. I copy and paste them onto a google doc. I try to answer what I can before I watch lectures to alert myself to what I need to be learning and what I already know. If I have time, I’ll look up some of the concepts I don’t know on YouTube to see if anyone I like has videos on the topics.

I want to be done with watching lectures and notes in my learning objectives document by Wednesday.

Next step, I try to make one-page summary sheets with drawings or graphs that I think are important on Wednesday & Thursday. I try to identify what I think is high-yield and try to limit all this information to fit on one page for easy reference.

Once I’m done with my MSAP lecture notes, I’ll make Anki cards and hope to be done by Friday because the school offers discussion groups run by students who have passed MSAP on Fridays. I think I read somewhere that they’re around 1 hour long. I didn’t go to the discussion group this week because I felt pretty comfortable with the material but hope to try it out next week.

Saturday, I plan to review until my quiz on Sunday afternoon! I hope this 3 pass system will work for me. My grade for sticking to this plan this week: B haha.

How it actually went

The quiz was not so bad - 30ish multiple-choice questions. Other than spending 15 minutes anxiously working with customer service to get my laptop screen record thing fixed. I didn’t do so bad! I was nervous to see if the difference between my experience and what medical school testing was going to be like was going to be way beyond me, but this week was manageable.

Next week, I get to visit SGU for the See SGU experience! SGU offered this program for me for a fully expensed trip to fly out to the island. I’ll be flying there on Monday. SGU also planned for me to have an excursion on the island, tour the campus and sit on a class, and then fly back on Friday. Can’t wait to update y’all on that!

Warmly, Rainee