After lunch Dad drove all four of us to the local airport where his plane was. I was going to get a ride in a two-seater Piper Cub. I’d been on lots of planes before, but never a small propeller-driven plane like this. As we drove through the airport Dad gave us a tour of [...]
Archives for My Ambulance Education
Chapter 14a. Meeting Her Family
We were going to meet Ann’s parents, and the drive from Lansing to Flint, Michigan, where they lived, was only about an hour. I had met several members of her family already and gotten the seal of approval from them. But now I was meeting Mom and Dad, and felt as nervous as if I [...]
Chapter 13b. Planning a Future and Making a Discovery
Graduate school is a lot more than school. Yes, there are classes, and yes a degree is involved and there is most definitely tuition being paid for class credit. But graduate school is most definitely work—it is a full time job. It involves deadlines, duties, bosses and a small subsistence stipend, which is aptly named. [...]
Chapter 12c. My First Scientific Meeting
Attending a big scientific convention like The Biophysics Meeting was an opportunity to meet some of my heroes in person. I was giddy with anticipation at the prospect. I searched through the list of names and abstracts looking for names and subjects that might be related or important to my work. There were lots of [...]
Chapter 12b. My First Scientific Meeting
Dr. Dillon and I talked at length about my work and what I wanted to present at the meeting. We wrote up an abstract of the research data and started making plans to attend the meeting. Planning to attend a meeting like this takes time. The written abstract is submitted in October for a meeting [...]
Chapter 12a. My First Scientific Meeting
Chapter 12. My First Scientific Meeting The physiology graduate students and I formed a nice little study group to relate our trials and tribulations to each other concerning classes and the physiology faculty. We could compare notes on classes, make suggestions as to classes or faculty advisors and just listen when things were going wrong. [...]
Chapter 11d. The Challenge of the Comprehensives
With the neurophysiology texts and cheat sheets in front of me I tried to get started on my final studying for Wednesday. But I couldn’t get the endocrine-reproduction exam out of my head. I wrote down each of the questions from both exams and a brief synopsis of what my answers were. I was sure [...]
Chapter 11c. The Challenge of the Comprehensives
The big day finally arrived, after 42 days of studying during which my body went through 41 sleep/wake cycles. All eight of the Ph.D. candidate students got to our meeting place very early with coffee, food, drinks and even changes of clothes to be prepared for a long 8 hours of testing split by a [...]
Chapter 11b. The Challenge of the Comprehensives
I was intensely studying something called kinetics. This is the study of rates of chemical reactions and it involves a lot of math. It was an essential part of my research and I worked hard to learn all of the formulas and how the math worked with the science. I had all sorts of numbers [...]
Chapter 11a. The Challenge of the Comprehensives
The comprehensive exam is a big written and oral exam that every Ph.D. student at Michigan State University needs to take and pass. In my own case, it would cover all of the material in my physiology texts and be broken up into the 6 major areas of physiology. Those areas were: Neurophysiology, cardiovascular physiology, [...]
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