the perils of

Here's something you don't often hear from people who have passed the boards: unemployment sucks.  I bum around the condo for most of the day. I only ever leave to forage for meals, and some days I just can't be bothered. "Moonlighting" gigs, or temporary doctor jobs, are abundant, but they often get snatched up very easily.  Fortunately, I managed to snag a job last month with the clinic at Ateneo de Manila, through a friend who needed someone to fill in for her. Working at the Loyola Schools was a breeze. It's literally right across where I live, there aren't that many patients, and when there are, they're all benign. It was like coming home. I used to cross this bridge every morning in college. In my excitement, I arrived an hour early. Clinic was closed. The Ateneo campus is just as beautiful as I remember. There's now a self-care room on the second floor the Social Sciences building where you can take naps and rest...

Date: October 20, 2019 - a day after oath taking Time: 12:09 AM Mood: 2 out of 10 smiley faces Today was a big day.  In the morning we had our oath taking, which is a prerequisite to the practice of medicine (i.e. you're not allowed to practice medicine until you say your oaths). I'm still bitter about the fact that we had to pay 700 bucks to go to this thing, even though attendance is legally required to practice med.  Oath taking happens in three batches, determined alphabetically. Fortunately for me, because my last name starts with a C, I was sorted into the first batch and the whole thing was done by 11 noon.  Being a formal event, people really dressed up in suits and long gowns. For lack of any formalwear myself, I was fortunate enough to borrow my aunt's custom-made lacy pink dress. Unfortunately for me, I'm still packing some weight from the boards review and I could feel my tummy rolls always on the brink of ripping apart the dress fabric....

any people come into Health Sciences dead set on being a doctor. But in the past few months of my junior year alone, so many Health Sci majors have shifted gears and decided otherwise. What's surprising is not that people are actually rethinking their choice to go to med school, but that so many of them are doing it in about the same period of time, as if it were a contagious disease.       My apologies for the horrible metaphor. I'm not saying that questioning yourself is a bad thing. In fact, it's a terrific thing. The huge, scary decision of what to do with your life after you graduate is a choice that you will inevitably be forced to make. There's just no getting around it, unless perhaps you plan to flunk your subjects and stay in school forever (a decision I actually mulled over for a while, because I really do love being in college). Otherwise, it's best to be prepared when that time comes. You wouldn't want to be stuck in med school knowing deep do...