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(11/10/13 1:55am)
Prospective students for Mercer University’s School of Medicine gathered on Friday to attend the Discover MUSM event, where they were able to see just what the School of Medicine has to offer. Specifically for students looking at the Medicinal Doctor program, the event split attendees into four groups, where they were then led to four sections of the event. These sections included a tour of the school, a chance to experience the problem-based learning the school employs, a meeting with an admissions committee member in order to see what was expected of them when they apply, and also an interaction with a standardized patient.
“I think anyone can go to med school; but you have to have the discipline, the ability to stay calm and get out of your head and just let it be, and the passion to do it,” said Ambassador Melody Bowen. The Ambassadors are the public face of the medical school, and serve in events such as this, as well as working on interviews as a part of the evaluation process. With only eight chosen from each class, the competition to become an ambassador is almost as harsh as it is to get into the med school.
“The hardest part about becoming a doctor is getting into medical school,” said Ambassador Trent Dittmar, a second-year student at the School of Medicine. “After that, it’s easy.”
For first and second year students, the main focus is on book learning. How the Mercer School of Medicine goes about this is through a curriculum known as problem-based learning. This means that the students go through phases of learning, the first one being Biochemistry. They are given real-world simulation cases to go along with their study guide, which helps them study for their tests at the end of the year. At the end of every phase, which generally lasts six to eight weeks, the students are given two tests. One is a multiple choice exam that is meant to simulate the boards the licensing tests for medical students, while the other is an oral exam based on the cases that the students study. The only lectures that are given under the curriculum are known are Resources, and are available online for the students to watch at home.
Also, while in their first and second years, students only attend classes for three hours every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. After this, they spend the rest of their day studying. They can do this either in the library, the common area or the tutor rooms. The tutor rooms are where the students meet for classes, and can only be accessed by Bear Card, which ensures the safety of student possessions. “People leave their stuff here, their computers out, it’s really a family atmosphere. I never felt like I was in competition with anyone, I never felt like I couldn’t leave my stuff out,” said Bowen.
“My favorite thing about Mercer is the people. I know everyone in my class, in the class above me and the class below me. It feels like everyone cares about one another. When you help nourish and foster the learning environment, everyone is better because of it,” said Dittmar.
For those interested in attending Discover MUSM, the Mercer School of Medicine Savannah campus is hosting the event on April 4 in the spring.
(11/28/12 11:00pm)
Renesmee.
The name alone is ridiculous, and the name brings up a host of bad feelings among even the most devoted “Twilight” fans. Arguably, Renesmee is the worst thing that ever happened to the “Twilight” series on all accounts.
On the day she entered the picture in the final installment, “Breaking Dawn,” the narrative lost any credibility it had left.For those who have not read the books, Renesmee is a person. Kind of.
To be more specific, she’s the outrageous baby born to Bella and Edward a month after they get married. She only gets less believable when we discover that she will reach physical maturity at six years old – at which time she will look twenty. Also, Jacob Black (yes, Bella’s ex Jacob) falls madly in love with her mere minutes after her birth. But don’t worry about all that for now.
Instead, worry about the fact that Renesmee’s movie incarnation just took “Twilight” into a very uncomfortable realm known as the “uncanny valley.” To sum up several dissertations’ worth of information, the uncanny valley is a metaphorical category for things that are almost human – but not quite.
Characters that fall into the uncanny valley are usually computer-animated, and they look human enough to almost pass as flesh and blood, but still fake enough to give you a viscerally uncomfortable “something’s-wrong-here” kind of feeling. One good example of this is Spielberg’s recent “Tintin” movie. The computer animation is so good that the characters look like real people – but at the same time, they maintain their exaggerated cartoon features.
The sight of this phenomenon literally freaks people out on a subconscious level, and that’s why the “Tintin” movie did so poorly despite its good reviews.
Let’s carry this over to the “Twilight” franchise. Remember that in the books, Renesmee is growing at ridiculous speeds.
Over the span of “Breaking Dawn - Part 2,” she goes from looking like a newborn to looking like an elementary school kid – and we even see a scene with her as a young adult. This is understandably difficult to portray.
The filmmakers could have approached it in a number of ways (casting several children and one adult who look alike seems reasonable to me) but they elected to cast one twelve-year-old actress and paste digitally-aged versions of her face on about ten different people over the course of the movie. It turned out about as well as we could have expected.
Baby Renesmee looks like a lizard-humanoid-thing, and grown-up Renesmee looks like department store mannequin that has come to life. The fact that all these uncanny creatures resemble one another so well is really little consolation.On all accounts, the creators of “Breaking Dawn” were ambitious.
However, they ended up overstepping the bounds of what computers are able to do, and the movie suffered for it. I vote that the “Twilight” fans do with the movie what we did with the books: pretend “Breaking Dawn” never happened. It will save us a lot of heartache in the long run.
(11/07/12 11:00pm)
I will be the first one to admit that my frustration with Thanksgiving began as a rather petty, personal vendetta.
It stemmed out of the bitterness of a girl who, no matter how hard she tried, could never make it through the third week of November without developing the flu.
You think I’m kidding. Out of the 21 Thanksgivings I have been alive, I think I have spent about a dozen of them lying on the couch in misery, coughing up a lung and watching reruns of It’s a Wonderful Life.
To this day, I associate the taste of turkey and dressing with the sick-sweet grape flavor of children’s liquid Tylenol.
However, as I grew, learned, and read, I came up with a new and possibly even better reason to dislike Thanksgiving: the fact that there is no realistic basis behind the holiday.
If you’ve gotten as far at Mercer, you probably know by now that whatever you learned in kindergarten about the “Thanksgiving” feast of 1621 (or 1637, accounts differ) is false.
Though nobody alive at the present time is totally sure of what went down, we can all agree on a few basic facts: there were no buckled shoes, prayers, or even turkeys. In fact, many historians doubt the banquet happened at all.
So why do we celebrate it, you ask? Just so you know, the answer was originally guilt.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the United States government finally started feeling a little bit bad for massacring hundreds of millions of Native Americans and taking their land.
But instead of confronting the issue and making amends, they decided to create an illusion of a brotherhood that never really existed.
Abraham Lincoln made the holiday official in 1864, and around the time of World War II, pageants with pilgrims, Indians, and turkeys started popping up in elementary schools.
At the end of the day, the plan to put a positive spin on a very sad chapter in our history worked; as a culture, we don’t associate the arrival at Plymouth Rock with the genocide that was to follow. We associate it with banquets, brotherhood, and giving thanks.
As for where the rest of our traditions came from, who really knows for sure?
Football is an American staple anyway, and watching a bunch of preschoolers stumble around in feathered headbands is just cute.
But it doesn’t have too much to do with respecting an entire population that was wiped out because of European greed.
I don’t intend to be a buzz-kill. Those of you who don’t associate apple pie with antibiotics (as I do), enjoy your Thanksgiving meal.
But in the silence between the arrival of Santa at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and the kickoff of the evening football game, try to take a moment to think about what really happened all those years ago.
After all, as they say: those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it.