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Another week coming to an end...
After the craziness of the past few weeks, this week wasn’t as bad. Thankfully, I did not have that much work or any exams, which was a break. The past week was spent mostly in my bed still trying to get better from my ear infection. Most of this weekend will probably be spent trying to catch up on the all the work that I’ve been slacking on the past 2 weeks.
Work Load in Classes
In my epidemiology class, we have been working on case-studies. My professor has taken real life examples and has given us the challenge on determining on how to handle the different cases. We are suppose to determine whether the case is an epidemic, endemic, or pandemic; following this, we are suppose to analyze the case determining the attack rates as well as calculating other statistics that are normally done in the real world. After completing the calculations and graphs, we are to write a field report discussing our findings. It’s actually a kind of interesting assignment. I always feel that when professors give us real life situations and we are to analyze them, I get more out of the exercise than I do if I were to read the text book. This has been the main project that I’ve been working on and hopefully will finish it up sometime this weekend.
Something also occurred this week that I never though would. I scheduled my classes for my last semester here at JMU. I never thought that this day would come. When in college, you never really realize that there is life outside of JMU. I was looking over my transcript, trying to determine how many credits I still needed to graduate as well as what classes I was still required to take for my major. At JMU, you need a total of a 120 credits to graduate. Currently, I have 112 credits, but in order to become a fulltime student you need 12 credits. This was a huge decision for me, because of course I want to be able to enjoy my last semester of senior year since everyone always says, “These are the best years of your life”, but I still need to take classes that will prepare me for graduate school. I spent a lot of time talking with professors and discussing what classes they felt would be most beneficial to me. The classes that I decided on were: Bio224(Genetics), HSA365(Health Administration and Policy), HTH300(Medical Terminology) , ISAT 493(Senior Thesis), ISAT480(Independent Study). As you may recall this summer, I spent most of my time here at JMU working in the lab completing my internship. For this I did a lot of lab work involving Eukaryotic Expression Systems. For ISAT 480, I will be conducting research with a professor focusing on Bacterial Expression Systems which will be a great opportunity for me. Most students don’t get this type of opportunity till their 2nd year of graduate work. It will probably be very time consuming, but in the end worth it.
This pretty much concludes my work for the week. This weekend will probably be quiet, filled with chicken noodle soup and movies! Talk to everyone sometime next week!
Posted by Kristen on November 4, 2005 01:58 PM | Link | Email Kristen
