The trip to Maine General Augusta hospital was the highlight of the Anatomy and Physiology janplan. Besides touring the hospital and giving a talk to a room full of 40+ doctors, we were given the chance to spend over an hour talking personally with medical students. A friend and I toured the hospital with three medical students, two fourth years and one third year. Since I got to Colby I’ve been back and forth deciding if I want to follow a pre-med track or not. Talking with the medical students completely changed my perspective on medical school and made me sure that’s what I want to do, and so I’m really grateful that I had the chance to take this class and take advantage of this opportunity. I’m a French major and so I have interests other than necessarily pursuing the sciences. However, talking with the medical students made me realize that taking time off between undergrad and med school and learning in depth about another topic is a really valuable asset to bring to the classroom. One of the fourth years told us that he went to graduate school to study theology and become a teacher and after a few years of that went back to finish his pre-med requirements and take the MCAT. Another fourth year told us that she spent a couple years off doing research before med school. The third year student told us that she went straight to med school, but sometimes wishes she had taken time off, and really appreciates what the students who did take time off can contribute. I loved being able to hear about the paths they took to get to medical school, and I know now that it may actually benefit me in the long run to pursue other interests before finally applying to med school.
One of the other highlights from the janplan was the trip to the Boston Body World Vitals exhibit. There were dozens of different dissections of bodies and we were able to see so many parts of the body that we had just learned about on an actual human. Thom spent a good 15 minutes showing a friend and I all the different nerves in a dissection and how they relate to each part of the body which was really cool because we hadn’t had the chance to cover them all in lab. It was also fascinating to see how the dissections had been made. For example, there were many models of exactly where all the veins, arteries, and capillaries were in a structure in the body. This type of model would have probably been impossible to recreate, it needed to be made from a real human body. These were made by filling the vasculature with plastic and then melting away the tissues covering it. There were also bodies that had been dissected into three parts so you could see both halves of the body and the bones and organs all separately. It was really amazing what the different angles in the body could expose.
This janplan was great because we were given many opportunities to explore different career paths in the medical field, which is unlike most science classes that I have seen offered at Colby. This class was clearly geared towards the interests of the students, which is not always the case and which is why I really appreciated taking this class, regardless of the workload. I didn’t come into this class expecting to have such unique opportunities like take field trips to Boston or talk with current medical students and those were the aspects of the class that made really enjoy it.
