Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Guest Post: First Semester finished

Guest blog post by Jason Anderson the missing in action husband.

Well I made it through the semester. Ross does some odd things with grades. In order to create a spirit of cooperation and to help students figure out how to study, Ross does a pass fail first semester. So with a pass/fail semester, your letter grade won't matter as much just as long as you are above the minimum passing score (MPS). I have heard that this set, based on a bell curve of sorts and will effectively drop about 10-15% of the people in the class. So yes grades matter to pass the semester but they don't carry over to contribute to your overall GPA. I hope that makes sense. Saying this, however, I was able to scrape by with an overall score just around the class average and I hope I can use the skills that I learned to be in a better spot next semester and to get a good letter grade. I think next semester will be a bit better for me since it is mainly based on physiology and that stuff is more conceptual in nature so life so be easier to figure out. We will be going over the physiology of the different organ systems this coming semester and we will be getting into more clinical practice. Michelle, William, and Savannah are about to become my test prep dummies for my exams that I will have in my clinical class.

Hopefully I made the right choice taking on the fast track of life. At Ross you have the choice between the accelerated 4 semester track or the curriculum 5 semester track. Each track teaches the same material but they are spaced out differently. So for example in the 4 semester track I'll get all the organ systems to learn and study where in the 5 semester track they will get all of them except for 2 or 3 systems which they will learn in their last semester along with other material they have skipped from 3rd and 4th. So during the semseter the students on 5 semester track will have week long breaks that are there to help them study. The jury is still out on whether or not this extra time helps the students prepare for their exams or in preparation for STEP 1. So fast track is related to the normal speed you would see at an MD program in the States. And if I can't cut it then I can always drop to the slow track while adding an extra semester to my stay here at Ross and an extra $30,000 in debt. Pray that I can cut it. :-)

So as Michelle has mentioned I have been called as the Branch President here in Dominica. We have a good sized branch in Portsmouth and a very strong group that is down in Roseau (about an hour away in a car). For those of you that are unfamiliar with these terms, a branch is a small congregation and a group is a smaller congregation that is technically part of the branch, but just meets elsewhere. When we visited the group two Sundays ago, they started the meeting with 6 people and church ended with about 16 people there. The branch, on the other hand, has about 45 adults and a whole lot of little kids running around. Now, a Branch President is a non-paid, leadership role, that oversees the church; pretty much like a Pastor except I don't give sermons each week, but get to delegate that responsibility to the members most weeks. A branch president is like a normal Mormon Bishop, but he doesn't hold the same priesthood authority.  It's not the easiest calling/assignment in the church, but it will be good for me to grow from it. It will be quite the challenge to balance church duties, family duties, and school work. But I'm hopeful that it will all work out for my good.

So yeah, my time is taken up with that now. My study buddy and I will start reviewing some 2nd semester ideas here soon during the break. We want to get a head start so we can get a better hold on the concepts and we hope that doing this will help us have some more time with our families during the first part of the semester. We are getting a lot of good help from other students who have taken the classes before. It is a little hard to get motivated to study inside on a computer when you have free time and when it is so beautiful outside.

I hope you enjoyed this blog. Happy New Year.