Sanjay Anand Louis Tulane Pharm blog

(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

     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

     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