Lights of Hope

Over Thanksgiving break, I was given the opportunity to help setup for an annual event for my hometown community called Lights of Hope, which is an outdoor Christmas festival complete with light displays, hay rides, mazes, arts and crafts, and many more activities. I was able to help setup lights (and will be helping tear down after Christmas) and other displays at a local park with my older brother for 2 days, or 14 hours total. I have previously helped set up for this event in my high school days and it was always extremely rewarding to see the finished product after everything was finished. This event is extremely unique and it allows for people around the area to come to a safe and family-friendly environment during the holiday season.

            I had planned to acquire more hours through the habitat for humanity, but sadly the weather did not agree with my available date in November. When I go home again for Christmas break, I have agreed to help work at the event in the days leading up before Christmas as well as help tear down the event and take down all of the lights. This will total to greater than 24 hours as each of the tear down days (2) are scheduled to be 6 hours each.

October Blog post

One of the main reasons I have chose this particular Master's program was because of the emphasis that was put on community service. I have a long history with community service type tasks and I plan to make it a lifelong pledge to serve the community, wherever that may end up being. I have yet to have time to complete any community service hours due to personal reasons, but I have signed up with habitat for humanity to work on construction projects within the coming month.

            This program has already started to teach me valuable lessons that I did not learn during my time in undergrad. If I am being completely honest, I was unmotivated during my time in undergrad. The worst part was that I kept succeeding and “getting by” just by using my natural problem solving abilities. I never had a wakeup call or moment that caused me to change my study habits. I have quickly realized early on in this program that in order to succeed, I must commit to the work and repeatedly review the material in order to be successful. One of the reasons that I have adopted this mentality is because I can finally see a purpose behind it all. I never used to be interested in a topic that I was studying because I never allowed myself to put it into context. Recently, I have had a different mindset that has been a motivation to learn the material as well as understand how that information might be useful to me in my future career path. I look forward to learning the future material as well as applying this material years later during my career.

My experience in the Master’s of Pharmacology program at Tulane School of Medicine has been very pleasant so far. Coming from the largest university in the nation, I have never been in a class this small before. Most of my classes in my undergraduate were between 100 and 300 people. This is an advantage for me as it allows the students and faculty to get to know each other more easily.

I am unlike the other students in the class, however. Rather than applying for medical school this cycle, I have applied for dental school. I believe this program will benefit me greatly even though I am not applying for medical school. I have talked with colleagues currently in dental school who state that they are learning the same material and have a complete medical pharmacology course in dental school. Some people say this is one of the tougher subjects to master in dental school, so I am happy that I will have a leg up on the competition when I eventually get in.

One thing I wish that the program could improve on would be to offer more pharmacologic information related directly to dentistry. The program is advertised as a Master’s Program that will improve prospective medical students’ resumes as well as prospective dental students’ resumes. However, there is an obvious correlation with medical school in the curriculum and not much correlation with dental school. I am aware that Tulane does not have a dental school, but I still think it would be appropriate to offer more information for prospective dental school students. I am not sure exactly how they could improve this aspect of the program, but a few possible ways would be:

-Offer dates/times of seminars or learning labs that LSU Dental offers

-Possibly set up an agreement type of deal with LSU dental about getting involved clinically at the dental school, whether that be shadowing, dental assistant training, or various other dental related experiences that could improve one’s resume (a great example of this would be at Temple University. They have a program very similar to this except during the summer before the 1-year program starts, they give the prospective dental students the option to be trained as a dental assistant at their clinic, which they can then earn volunteer hours throughout the semester working in the clinic while acquiring valuable experiences. I applied to this program but decided not to attend due to the price difference).

Again, I am not sure how possible that would be to implement at this school, since they do not have a dental school themselves, but I have heard that they have some ties to the LSU School of Dental Medicine.