Posts

April Blogpost

      April was the last month of the program, and I met it with a mix of apprehension and excitement. In many ways, it was the most difficult - having to simultaneously study for a cumulative final exam while making plans to pack up the last year of my life in just a couple of weeks was definitely a headache. But I was appreciative of the NBME exam, even for all the stress it caused me, as it was a chance to reflect on the growth that I've made both as a pharmacologist and as a student over the course of the program.       With a very poor showing in my undergrad years due to a mix of depression, procrastination, and a severe lack of discipline, even when given a second chance to prove myself as a student of medicine via the program, I was doubtful that I would be able to stack up to others attending, who were all clearly highly motivated and intelligent students. As I reviewed topics from last semester like antibiotics and cancer treatments, to more recent ones like psychopharm,
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March Blogpost

 COMMUNITY SERVICE HOURS: 4 Hours, soup kitchen      This month was, despite being super stressful thanks to all of my presentations aligning on nearly back to back weeks, was one of my favorite of the program, thanks to the material we were being lectured on. Dr. Clarkson mentioned during our orientation that the psychopharm module was one of the best, and I can see why he was tooting its horn - I haven't been so invested in a module before, as the topics presented were just fascinating. The fact of the matter is, a lot of the illnesses discussed during the modules, like schizophrenia and Alzheimer's, are unsolved medical mysteries; at least, even more so than usual. The lectures felt like being presented a challenge, as the next generation of medical practitioners and researchers, as these awful ailments beckon towards me and my class members to add our own contribution to the fight against them. I have a personal connection to the epilepsy lectures, as a close friend of mine
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February Blogpost

 COMMUNITY SERVICE: 10 hours soup kitchen. This month was an extremely interesting month for me in terms of program curriculum, as we did both endocrine pharmacology, one of my worst subjects, immediately followed by neuropharmacology, one of my best. In fact, in undergrad, taking an endocrine biology unit test and doing abysmally was one of the reasons I decided to change my major from biology to neuroscience, so it was amusing to see them lined up back to back like they were this semester. It served as a nice reminder of my progression as a student - past Sanjay might have stumbled and lost motivation to perform well on a subject that he wasn't particularly interested in, but now I put in genuine effort to keep up the academic hot streak I've been on over the past year, and it's nice to know I can give anything the same amount of energy and discipline if it helps me progress in my academic career. After coming home from spring break, I decided to knock out my community se
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January Blog Post

     This month has been a flurry of activity, as I get adjusted to the new format and new classes of the Spring curriculum. While the ol' reliables of Principles and MedPharm fit like a glove thanks to them being repeats from last semester, the addition of a number of new classes that are lead more by independent research by the students instead of a strict curriculum set by the professors has been interesting to get used to, to say the least. I'm sure this is the point of these classes, but not having the luxury of blindly following a set guideline of study material, and instead having to go out into the "world," so to speak, and research on my own, in order determine what the rest of my classmates will learn in this course, has been a daunting task to come to terms with. This week, fellow classmate Magda and I have been working on our presentation for Neuropharmacology regarding novel treatments to rescue Schizophrenia-like cognitive deficits, and having to teach o
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November 2021 Blog post

(SERVICE HOURS: 2 hours creating thanksgiving cards with the class, 12 hours of work at a food bank over break)  This month, I decided to focus my extracurricular efforts on my community service efforts. Of course, this course requirement came at the 11th hour, in true Sanjay fashion. This month, I helped the class create thanksgiving cards for underprivileged children, and decided to spend my otherwise idle thanksgiving break volunteering at a foodbank at what I was told was a "particularly busy weekend". Despite being at more of a loss than I've ever been, curriculum wise, during this class, I decided to distract myself by giving back to my original community of Edison, NJ. Spending 4 hours a day at a thanksgiving soup kitchen run by my local church, I  spent 12 hours of my break helping my community with hours that would have otherwise been spent on video games or sleep.  This hasn't been my only mandatory "community service" hours; I've had to run 5K
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October 2021 Blog Post

     This month has been a humbling experience in terms of my presumed ability to juggle my work and home responsibilities and free time. Coming into the masters program, I assumed that I could expect a similar workload to undergrad - sure, the material might be more intensive, but having to focus on only one curriculum as opposed to the 5 or 6 tangentially related classes of an undergrad semester would be a saving grace - or so I thought.         However, this month was my first taste of what a masters program is really like - and it knocked me on my ass. The plethora of information that I needed to not only memorize, but truly internalize if I wanted a shot at doing well on the exams really pushed me to my limits when it comes to my notorious tendency to procrastinate. Between the hours I felt I had "lost" at the gym, cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, or even just sleeping, when exam time crept up on me, I found the hard to enjoy the little things in life, as the  ever- per
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September 2021 - Post-Hurricane Ida post

     Hurricane Ida was not my first experience with a hurricane, having had to deal with the fallout of Sandy hitting the northeast back in 2012. As such, I went into Ida weekend with a nonchalant attitude of overconfidence - "If I had no issues with 5th worst hurricane in US history," I thought, "I'll probably walk out of this one like it's no big deal."     Ida taught me the strange feeling of being aware of what I've come to refer to as my "altitude privilege." Edison, NJ is, all things considered, a weather haven. We're situated on a hill for the most part, meaning we're too high above sea level to have to deal with the strongest of winds or the worst of the flooding from the tropical storms that, from time to time, meander our way, but we're not high enough to be effected by things like the jet stream or the extreme snow and cold that gets thrown the way of mountains. Sure, we used to get some pretty bad blizzards and nor'e
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