The worst part about the whole medical school admissions process is definitely the waiting time — the wait between when you submit your application and when it gets transmitted, the wait between when your application gets transmitted and when you hear back from schools about interviewing, and worst of all: the wait between your interview and your acceptance (if the school loves you enough).

The first round of acceptances for Texas medical schools went out today, and I’m happy to say that I’m going to be a doctor. But is it selfish to say that I’m greedy for more? I want to keep the specific school private because I honestly don’t think it’s a good match for me in terms of what kind of career I want to build for myself. I’m desperate to hear back from my dream schools — I only hope UT-Houston or UT Southwestern deem me worthy enough to include me in their matriculating class of 2015. Pretty please?

But anyway — new look! Helvetica and Courier New, ahoy!

…and I kind of love it.

It’s funny how something you’ve mocked up or visually drafted can look so awesome initially, but after a period of time, you grow to get sick of it. I absolutely hated the “Big Bird” theme I had up before, so I decided to change it. I spent the better part of the afternoon/evening working on this theme — I might end up changing the colors later, but for the most part I think this layout is here to stay for a long time. (Or at least what constitutes a long time in my book, anyways.) My favorite parts are definitely the bottom div (which actually gave me a lot of grief) and the header. For the easily amused, image rollovers = win.

My morning was spent “shadowing” a neurologist at UT Houston. I put shadowing in quotation marks because today’s time spent observing her equaled a whopping 30 minutes — less than the time it took for me to drive downtown to the Texas Medical Center, get my TB test read, pick up my name badge, drive over to her secretary’s office building, park my car, walk over to the building to find her secretary, walk across the street with the secretary to said neurologist’s clinic, and finally find said neurologist at said clinic. I came at the time she specified for me, but I was only able to catch her stitching up a patient’s calf from a nerve biopsy she just performed (blood and ooze, galore!!).

Don’t get me wrong; I’m extremely appreciative of the opportunity she’s giving me, but I was only slightly disappointed with my first day. Good news: I still have more days to shadow her, and she’s extremely nice. Bad news: will I have to pay an extravagant amount of money for parking every time I drive downtown to observe?

The pediatric cardiologist I’m also shadowing this summer is on vacation for the next two weeks. Kind of sad, since I was only able to spend an afternoon with her once before she left — but it was a very exciting day. Saw two patients with Marfan’s, an ultrasound being done, a basically newborn baby with a hole in between his ventricles, and a patient she’s been following for about seven years who has had multiple surgeries to address the holes in his heart and mitral valve issue. I’ll have two more opportunities with her after she gets back though, and I’m looking forward to it — her office is literally a minute away from my house by car, and parking is free!

All of this just makes me want medical school more. Too bad writing secondary essays suck. I’ve completed 2 of the 7 I need to do, and up next is Baylor. BCM’s basically been my dream school since I’ve decided to pursue medicine because 1) it’s close to home, 2) situated at the Texas Medical Center, 3) pre-clinical years are slightly shortened, and 4) it’s Baylor. Ugh, here’s hoping.

There’s a new look here at the blog! I had a spur of the moment burst of energy and inspiration and decided to channel that into the long, arduous process that is coding a custom WordPress layout. There are several things I did with this layout that I wanted to try out:

1. Using custom fonts! I used this quick and easy tutorial by the lovely Jenny to replace all <h1> tags and the page menu with a font I’ve been in love with recently – District Thin. I really love how it turned out!
2. Integrating Lifestream. I’ve been wanting to integrate the Lifestream Plugin for a while now, but I never got around to it. Unfortunately for me, there’s still some kinks that need to be worked out — the Lifestream page only seems to look right in Internet Explorer (that’s a first!!) and is giving me problems in Chrome and Firefox. I haven’t checked Safari, but I’m assured by Marjorie that it looks right. Anyone know why? :(

I spent 7 or 8 hours straight from 9 at night to 5 in the morning completing the look (from designing to coding), and despite all the frustrations WordPress gives me, I was really happy while doing it. (Does that make me sound like a coding masochist? Hahahaha.) I think all in all, I’ve accomplished what I wanted to do with the look — something simple and clean. On the downside, I thought there was originally too much yellow going on (namely links), so I made entry links and sidebar links different colors. I’m not sure if it looks weird or not.

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