Update (boards, school, moving, travel)

Okay, so I admit I haven't been posting much on my blog for the last few months - even though things have been happening that are blog-worthy!

To start with, I spent the entire month of June sitting in a coffee shop studying for Step 1 of the D.O. and M.D. board exams (COMLEX and USMLE respectively), which represent the cumulative knowledge I supposedly gained during my two years in medical school. I took my USMLE exam on July 8th and the COMLEX on the 14th of July -I passed USMLE!!! However, this being the first year that COMLEX was administered electronically, they will not be getting us our results until the end of August so that they can have a good enough sampling of exams to calculate percentile scores. The rumor is that people who took their COMLEX at the end of July were scoring much higher than those who took theirs in early July (where does that put me?) - whether they simply had more time to study or because there was too much communication with those who had just taken the exam, I don't know. Sounds like they have a very complex system to score these things.

Because they gave us a month to study for said board exams, our summer semester was VERY short (although not short enough most of us would say). Our class is the last of our kind, as starting with next year's class, they now commence medical school during the summer and are done with the sitting for boards - none of this mucking about for an extra month afterward! ;o)
Nonetheless, even with full blow senioritis, I managed to pass my short summer classes. It helps that I had already learned some of the material seeing as how we had to study it for the boards we already took... that's a definite plus to the next generation of med students after us at our school; they will have finished all their courses and will have covered all that material BEFORE boards.

We took our last exam and I turned in my school mailbox key last Tuesday. Then I went back to my apartment to hurriedly pack up all my stuff (during the hottest day of the year so far in Lansing, much like their winter days are not) and move so that I could check out before the rental office closed for the night. We piled boxes of my stuff in Meg's parent's garage as they were kind enough to let me keep it there for a few weeks and so ended this two-year chapter in my life.