I’m not a pharmacist || FTMC || SGU Term 3
Life:
Exam Prep Vlog
When I asked people I knew in upper terms what Term 4 was like, I mostly got laughs masking traumatic memories or a brief paragraph that was a little too objective. I heard it was the hardest pre-clinical term. I’ve only got my toe stubbed into the door so far, it seems that way. I tried to document the last week leading up to the exam, I hope you’ll subscribe to my channel and join my adventure!
New books
I got my next set of reads from Thriftbooks and I’m in loooove. The “Red Queen” is such a fun break from reading monotonous educational reads. It’s got very “poor girl-chaebol” k-drama vibes. I also started “Emperor of Maladies”, a history book about cancer written by a physician. It sounds dry and dreary, but it’s got this dark humorous element that makes it a little easier to learn about our most endeavored foe. I highly recommend this book.
Paleo Reset Diet & Health coaching
I ordered two Chris Kresser books because I’ve enrolled in the ADAPT Health Coaching program! Part of being a health coach is also improving my health, so I’ll be doing a strict paleo for 30 days. I’m scared because I know I’m addicted to sugar.
Mental health & IMG worries
Something that was really distracting in this module was Match. It has been a source of inspiration in the past, but around 1 in 10 applicants didn’t get a residency match (or so I heard). 25% of IMG’s didn’t get a residency. With SGU quoting to be the top producer of IMG’s working in America, I can’t help think there were a lot of people who didn’t get a spot.
Term 4 FTCM
Foundation to Clinical Medicine Module (FTCM) is kind of like Foundations to Medicine in Term 1. It’s a hodgepodge of topics in pretty challenging depth. We learned pharm including the good ole pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics (math ugh) to the mechanisms, adverse effects, interactions, uses of drugs from autonomic drugs to opioids to gout. I can’t believe we really did that. There was also lots to know about bugs like Staph Aureus to Malassezia furfur like where do you find them, how do they present, what the histology looks like. We can’t forget about pathology either. We dipped into cell injury and even a tad (tad meaning like 4 lectures) into cancer.
There’s a lot of small groups
Like term 3, we had small group almost every day. Sometimes we had patient encounters with standardized patients, but there was a fair amount of pathology sessions. Pathology sessions are like histology sessions where you present a given slide and make a patient vignette question. We talked about what was on the slide, clinical associations like treatment and symptoms, and pathological mechanisms. However, unlike histology small groups we decided beforehand who is in charge of what slide. I’m guessing in the past, students would have to create and present their own presentations. However, the instructions were unclear for us and our group would just read off our notes made before class. It was actually really helpful because we were actually teaching each other about the different pathologies, unlike histology where at least I felt like I was reading notes out of the abyss.
Standardized patient encounters are weird.
Don’t get me wrong, I totally know as a physician we talk to people. However, talking to a standardized patient (basically an actor) over Zoom with 8 my peers and my facilitator is just awkward. I get the necessity of it, but it’s still a strange situation plus I’m so new to patient interviews. It feels like the long checklist I have in my head gets in the way of connecting with my patients. I hope this gets easier.
Is Term 4 Really That Bad?
Yup. For me at least. I want to believe I can get through this term with my grades intact, but I’m really not sure. I thought maybe the hype around Term 4 was because it’s tacked onto 6 weeks of Term 3 so maybe it was fatigue. Yes, it’s that but it’s also just hard.
FTMC Pace
I remember telling my friends, the first week felt like waiting to get punched in the face. The first week we started off with how to write notes and the autonomic drugs and pharmacokinetics from Term 1. You almost let your guard down. Then somewhere in between weeks 2 and 3 that feeling of being overwhelmed rushes forward. Followed by the temptation to give into fatigue. Yes, it’s week 3, but it’s also really week 9 of school!
It’s true, the best time to learn something is literally as soon as you get it. Don’t wait to learn something because it’s too easy to be crushed by all the things to learn.
My Notion for pharm
FTCM Content
Micro: there are many ways to describe a rash apparently
We got to know so many bugs pretty well. Buzzword learning sort of works, but not like before. The questions are harder for sure. It’s no longer given buzzword, what’s the treatment or what’s the disease. It’s given this patient’s age, symptoms, history, medications, what are the possible adverse effects of the drug you would prescribe? A couple of steps beyond what we’re used to. Real medicine, it’s so cool but wow it’s so intimidating.
Pharm
I tried so many ways to learn pharm. I watched pharmacy students’ advice on how to learn pharm and a couple of them recommended Notion. I think Notion is pretty and I loved it. Maybe if we were only learning pharm, it’d be possible but it took a lot of time to prep and then search through. There were premade charts, maybe I saw two (One of them was 51 pages!). But they weren’t as clean as past charts and I get it, I didn’t have any time to make my chart. In the end, like micro sketchy/pixorize +anki = brute force. And that worked for me. I want to say I had tried sketchy in Term 1, Term 2, and Term 3, and they wouldn’t stick that well but this time it worked and maybe that was out of desperation. Either way, I’m grateful.
There are sooo many DLA’s and they’re pharm DLA’s - without any videos. Wordy, high-yield, a lot of work. I swear many things were never mentioned in lectures, practice questions, or IMCQ’s and when I would “CTRL-F” my notes maybe 1 result would come up in small group or a DLA but apparently very high yield.
On top of that, there are accompanying lecture notes. They have about 5-10% more information in my guestimation. I just stuck with the notes.
Pathology
It was easy to fall in love with Pathoma for saving me. Maybe it’s a me thing, but the lectures felt basic. However, there was a lot of detail casually glazed over. It wasn’t until I did old the old IEA reviews literally the weekend before the test that I realized how much I missed. It hurt. Pathoma gave a gave chart for all those details, I would inhale it as soon as possible.
FTMC Exam
I’m writing this the day I took the exam so this review is both fresh and not well-reflected. It was the hardest exam I’ve taken at SGU for far. The way I processed the lecture materials and what I interpreted was high yield really didn’t prepare me for the obliteration of that FTCM exam.
FTCM Outside Resources
I used a lot of outside resources. They saved my butt, but lecture learning was never really my thing.
Sketchy + anki >>> Amazing!! I’m not any kind of anki guru, so I didn’t know that you have to search the whole deck to include the Zanki. I assumed it would have been in the SGU deck. After every lecture, I would search keywords and move those cards to my deck. Way faster than making my own.
Pathoma, looooove. So easy and concise.
Oke’s teachings? Apparently, Dr. Oke is a previous professor at SGU who is really amazing. He holds his own pathology classes for a couple of hundred dollars. I’ve heard nothing but amazing things about this course, but sadly I’m not made out of money.
What would I do differently
Figured out Zanki earlier and beat those sketchy images into my brain way earlier. I did about 50 new cards per day, but that wasn’t aggressive enough.
Better self-care, I got incredibly burnt out around weeks 2-3.
Nutrition Medicine Club & Extracurriculars
Since starting Term 4, I haven’t had any time or energy to hold any PLG’s. I can’t imagine on top of everything else, prepping another 2-3 hours to hold an hour session. I really wish I could be more available, but my brain is so fried!
I’ve been trying to start a Nutrition Medicine Club for about a year now. Over the winter break, I got an awesome crew who were so excited about nutrition. It was totally my fault, and I missed the deadline to submit our application by one day. The deadline moved up compared to the past term and I was in survival mode. Regardless, I took responsibility for it and spent a week begging everyone in the admin office to hear me out since we had been in contact for the past year about it. Sadly, that didn’t work out.
I’m really not sure how people do school, do PLG’s, and research, and more! I don’t even know how people did this term in person. I’m barely scraping by with every minute I can get haha.
Anywho onto Cardiorenal, oof. See you soon!