Mohammad Arfeen

I just returned home from a 2 week vacation with my family, it was a great experience, I got to eat amazing foods, relax with family, and in general enjoy life. I managed to stay unplugged for most of the time. Getting back I looked at my schedule and I realized that it’s about go get incredibly busy, extremely fast. On the 16th, in just a short week, I’ll be leaving again for research, returning only a day before school starts. This Thursday, the 12th, I’ll be on the Doctor Anonymous Radio Show at 8 PM Eastern time, not to mention that I have to write a couple of guest posts.

Once school starts, no doubt my schedule will get busier, participating in student research, serving as president of our chapter of the American Medical Students Association, and as a Teachers’ Assistant are all time-consuming activities. My course load for this next semester is also the hardest I’ve had so far in my career (I’ll put it at the bottom of this post). I’m also planning on taking my MCAT this January, after I returned yesterday, I thought carefully, and I’ve decided to heavily tone down my internet and social media presence. After I finish my appearance on the Dr.A show, and these last few guest posts, I will not be doing anymore live UStream shows or guest posts until February at the earliest. I will also heavily cut down my twitter usage, I may only tweet a couple of times a week, and you may have to wait a couple of days to hear a response. It hurts me to have to do this and cut out one of the things I love to do, but at the end of the day one must have proper priorities, and unfortunately my priorities do not involve me being on twitter and facebook as often as I have been in the past.

I will continue to write regular posts for Pre-Med Hell which is the reason I will not be accepting requests for guest posts; as writing those posts takes a decent amount of time, and I’m not willing to devote more time than that for writing at this point.

Fall 2010 Schedule
BIOL-340 : Cell Biology
BCHM-361 : Big Boy Biochem
BCHM-362 : Protein Lab
BIOL-258 : Human Physio
HUMN-230 : Baptism of Europe

Extracurriculars
Biophysics Research
President- American Medical Students Association (Benedictine Chapter)
Member- American Chemical Society/Society of Physics Students
Teachers’ Assistant – Organic Chemistry I Lab for Chemistry and Biochemistry Majors
Teachers’ Assistant – General Chemistry I Lab

School

Needless to say I am trying to get an A in organic chemistry this semester, which means studying a LOT. I’ve decided to set up a PBwiki for all of my notes, in every class. This way I can have all of my notes in an uniform standardized format. The benefit to this is that I am now able to log into my wiki and read my notes whenever I am free, and I don’t have to waste time looking for something specific. The way they are organized depends on the class; for instance in my organic chemistry class we have about 2 quizzes between each exam, so my notes are organized Q1, Q2, E1, Q3, Q4, E2, Q5, Q6, E3, Q7, Q8, F. This way I can continually reinforce concepts in my mind throughout the day.

Another tip that I have found to be helpful is to review my notes after every class, and then review them again before the next class. All in all, I try to review my notes about 3 times between each class. This way by the time the exam rolls around I will have memorized a good chunk of my notes.

Life

Life has been good, I have been keeping on track for my goals for this year. I just celebrated my birthday a few days ago. I have been working on growing my personal brand, as well as my other two brands, StudentEats and Pre-Med Hell. Also I have been working pretty hard to get our AMSA 5k set to go. We are probably as the AMSA board going to the AMSA national convention in Anahiem in March.

Blogging

I’m not going to lie its been hard to keep up with all my blogging since school started, I have been writing fairly long posts for my other blog “Pre-Med Hell” and trying to grow that. If your interested in writing for PMH let me know. I am also trying to keep up with Project 52, and so far so good I think I have managed a new post every week since the year started.

Any ways I thought I would throw out a quick update for you guys, and get back to studying for orgo. I promise a more meaningful and longer post next week, if you have any suggestions leave me a comment, I would love to read them.

-Signing off M.A.

I have decided to join the #p52 or the Project 52 movement, the point of it is to keep on track with my new years resolution of writing more. I will be at a minimum writing one post every week for this whole year. It is pretty hard to think of topic for every week already, but I am getting started and working to put myself in such a position.

I had to think for a while before deciding to do something so structured, but at the end of the day I knew that this would be one sure fire way to keep on track for a great 2010 and a great way to reach my goal.

Project 52 began on January 1st, 2010 and will end on January 1st, 2011. It’s a lot to think about 52 posts, but I’m sure that I will be able to do it.

Follow me on twitter: http://www.twitter.com/insanemo

My old host, Fusion-Hosts, folded, they gave notice that we had until September 18th, to switch hosts before our sites went offline. Although I enjoyed the freedom that my own wordpress installation gave me, I did not enjoy having to make sure that it was updated, that all the plugins were updated, and the themes were working with every subsequent upgrade. Nor did I enjoy making backups, and all of that jazz. So I finally decided, that I would use a wordpress.com hosted solution, money wise it costs considerably less than having a host, I don’t have to worry about upgrades, and themes or backups. All the links should remain the same hopefully, I have switched to a more minimalist theme, I kinda like it, and am growing quite fond of it but we shall see.