Hero's Journey Session Prayer At the close of our batch's first leadership mentoring of this semester, I find myself in a prayerful moment: Come Holy Spirit and teach me how to pray O incomprehensible one, You veil Yourself out of love for us– a love that is so radical that it deeply moves our depths even if we do not yet know it. Each of us have different ways of understanding You, but I know we all have a sense of You. To some You are the ideal version of one's self, to others You are there but indifferent, to many You are a person.  Either way, we are united in having a sense of You because we have a sense of goodness, of which You are its fullness, that which we all implicitly strive towards, and  from  which we set our true north in our own lived experiences. You are the starting and end point of our journey, that by Your very being creates a desire in us– the potential to be actualized. To contend with You is to contend with our very selves, for we are made...

Towards approaching the 2nd Semester Integratively We started the first week of the 2nd semester in ASMPH with the usual double whammy of an MD subject and an MBA. Many of us were quick to consider the MBA subject Strategic Human Resource Management (HumRes for shot) and whether it's as "chill" as last semester's or not. Mixed responses from across the section (and presumably the same for those who had a not so chill PriMan subject). I found it fascinating that there's this unspoken agreement that the MD subject (Cardiovascular and Respiratory Module, or "CardioRespi") is already going to be incredibly consumptive of both our focus and time, whereas the MBA subject is gauged merely on time.  The tension between the two subjects did not work so well for me last year ( as some posts in the past attest to ) so in short, I've thought to approach this semester integratively .  The CardioRespi lectures this week already provide an implicit demand for integ...

For When You Feel Empty There will come a time when you don't feel like doing medical school. And it wouldn't be the feeling that you hate it, just indifferent to it. All of the passion and fervent zeal on why you'd want to become a doctor may have been used up for the last module and you've had quite enough repetition. You may be feeling exhausted, or at least unmotivated to work out your medical doctorate with fear and trembling. You think that maybe you've been ungrateful or even an impostor! You don't recognize yourself in the mirror. Where did that youthful pre-med aspirant go? No breaths to spare with no spirit to inspire.  You may feel all these things, these overwhelming things. Let them. But don't give up. Persist, perspire, endure. This is exactly the time to turn those childish motivations in on its head. Go beyond this short vs. long term reward, and give it all up! If you try to get something out of it, are you really being genuine? Pursuing med...

  New Year's Eve 2021 Ever since the beginning of the break, I had thought very little of medicine. Sometimes, I forget that I'm even in medical school. Perhaps it will hit me tomorrow when the new year comes that what I had been typing about this past semester will have more material to base from in future musings. But it's not that I actively tried to forget it, but rather that I was busy with family, helping out with furniture assembly or other duties that I missed out on while I was slaving away in front of a screen, tablet or book. I realize that this may be what fills in the gaps. You know that saying? When you have to fill a bag with rocks and sand, it's best to put the rocks in first so the san can be filled in between. Otherwise, the sand in first would prevent the rocks from fitting inside the bag.  These little things that fill in the gap– the dining, the driving, the daily mass going with my grandmother– all of them, are moments that will likely keep me goin...

State of the Blog Address I haven't been posting as of late, and I had been intentionally aware of the times that I should have been writing to post on this. But in those 3 Saturday evenings, I decided not to write in favor of doing something else. This was partly due to struggling with sin, partly due to realizing the other thing was a "better use of time". Why? In brief candor it is because it became a tedious exercise. One could surely see this from the shortening length of each blog post, and the lessening enthusiasm of the words written. One thing to be gained from this is that indeed a worthwhile topic to write on cannot be expected to occur by Saturday evening every single week, partly due to busyness, partly due to that reflection needing to take two or even three weeks to flesh out in order to properly write. The second reason is that I've been less inclined about talking about the program from a point of view that is "disinterested". Surely there i...

 YL5 Week 13: Ear, Nose and Oral Cavity There's a lot of noise, or at least it seems so. That's kind of how it feels when in medical school sometimes, especially when it gets overwhelming. One gets engrossed in studying that even things that may sound pleasant appear as noise. And it's just something to drown out with studying until life flashes before one's eyes. My aunt from the states came earlier this midweek after hearing her mother's passing, just around the time that, after a lot of work, grade calculations came through to ensure that there's no danger of passing. This module had a lot of team based learning (TBL) that helps keep one accountable at least to contribute what one studies into the team, it's quite fulfilling– especially as we studied the oral cavity and ear. At the same time, one learns in medical school that not everything can be managed, and it is sometimes even good to be inconvenienced. It's hard to say no to some things, especial...