Darker than Black, Gemini of the Meteor

I haven't really had the chance to keep up with many anime series in the last little while, but the two that I have been watching on a weekly basis are Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood and Darker than Black, Gemini of the Meteor.

So far, in the past two episodes, we've found a new main character, Suou, whose brother turned into a contractor after a near-death incident when younger. We're still in the haze as to exactly whats happening but suffice it to say that events involving the Meteor Core (some necklace Suou wears and retreived from her brother).

We see our first glimpses of a much more tortured Hei, who we suspect first to be an antagonist/non-main character, but by the end of the second episode, it's clear that he's going to be one of the focus points of the second season as well.

Overall, I am getting the feeling that the episodes this time will follow a coherent plotline, something that in my opinion is an upgrade from before. Season 1 tended to be isolated stories from episode to episode that were just linked by a minor background story that only emerged once in a while. It seems much more like the season is going to be focusing on one major storyline as of now, but I guess we will have to see!

PS- Misaki is back!

First Month of Medical School

As I sit here procrastinating away time before my upcoming exam, I'm going to reflect on my first month of medical school and all the experiences I've had.

I guess, the entire point of almost every medical school's initial time is for the students to get comfortable with the new environment and to meet each other. As such, there has been a lot of partying (seems like a universal phenomenon for all Canadian med schools - seeing photos of friends who went elsewhere). School hasn't been too overly intense yet; however, I'm really getting used to the feeling that the faculty now listens and responds to its students.

In undergrad sciences, the faculty could give less than a rat's buttocks about whether or not its students were satisfied with the way schoolwork was being conducted. Professors would often come into classrooms and throw up an incoherent patchwork of slides that seemed like they took less than an hour of preparation and lecture on them. Half of the time there were mistakes within the slides and inconsistencies with other material taught in the courses. Nowadays, all the lecturers are handpicked from the best and all presentations used (save for a few - which our coordinator actually e-mailed us an apology about!) have been of the most top-notch quality. We are encouraged to finish evaluations and are told that all the evaluations (given a sufficient number of responses) are taken into consideration and future courses will be modified to incorporate our suggestions!

Additionally, the resources that are poured into our faculty and its students is just astounding. We have private lounges, study areas, a very low faculty:student ratio - especially in our small group learning.

Aside from that, I had my first clinical experience where I shadowed a community physician in the city. It was pretty relaxed, but I don't know if my experience has convinced me to enter family medicine as a profession. Most of patients that were seen had a routine procedure at best and at worst were coming by just to have a drug refill. Although I see the importance of the role of a family doc in the community, I'm not convinced that I would really want to spend my entire life refilling prescriptions and repeating monotonous procedures that I do every single day.

Anyways, I should be off to study again... more updates on med school as it comes!

Advice for Applying to Canadian Med Schools

Alright, here's my first post on pre-med/med advice! Please leave comments if you think the section is useful and I shall perhaps post more about this type of thing (ie. mcats, interviews, or more application stuff). If you have any questions leave your e-mail in the comments or even ask them in the comments and I shall do my best. The following post is about the written applications (the ones that you are submitting in the next few months online), not the interviews just yet.
Disclaimer: Don't take my advice as the be-it-end-all! It's how I did it, it worked for me, but it may not work for everyone! I am just trying to relate my experiences and am hoping they will help some of you out there! I'm not on the admissions committee, infact I haven't even started med yet, so my advice definitely isn't the one and only correct way to do things.

So about my application cycle: Applied to 8 Canadian Schools, interviewed at 3, accepted at 2 and waitlisted but eventually rejected at 1. Am a 3rd year applicant.

What I did right:

1) For the essays/ec sections. I sat down and listed out all the traits I think a good physician should have. I also identified the ones that I thought were harder to come by (ie. things that not every applicant would have). I then circled the ones that I thought I demonstrated through my extracurriculars and tried to write up my ECs such that they showed those traits (often I did more than one trait for each extra-curricular). If you guys want any more information on this or maybe examples or advice, please leave stuff in the comments as well as an e-mail so that I can pm you.

2) Apply to as many schools as you can. Med school is tough to get into in Canada, there are only about 1000 spots for a LOT of applicants. Maximize your chances and apply to as many as you can financially afford to. Don't be picky as to where you apply, because in the end, med school is med school in Canada. Every school is awesome and going to any Canadian med school, your going to get an MD and will have a great career. Only be picky when you have the chance: at the end if your accepted to more than one. But hey think about it, the only school you get into may be the one you had just applied to for the heck of it. Plus, some of the schools I applied to "just for the heck of it" turned out to really impress me when I went down to interview there (even more so than the ones I thought I would enjoy for sure).

3) Expanding on the last point, there are some really easy applications out there. If you can afford it, try your best to just throw in an application just incase you so happen to get an interview/admission there. For instance all Sask asked of me was a passport photo and my MCAT marks (and the typical questions like my name, address, phone number etc).

4) Spend lots of time on you essays/ec section. Half of what you write is what you actually did, the other half is how you write it. You can make something really mundane and typical sound amazing and as good as if you had gone and saved little children from fire-breathing dragons in Africa! Don't lie of course, but there's no point in downplaying your achievements either. Make them sound as good as they possibly can and don't be ashamed of doing it, everyone else is doing the same thing! If you feel awkward doing this, try what I did. I stepped back and pretended I wasn't [BlackComet] and that I was [BlackComet]'s friend writing about him and making him sound as good as I possibly could.

5) Get others to read over your essays/ec's. Don't take their advice as golden though. Preferably not other pre-meds, unless you can really trust them, incase they read over something you wrote and really like it and try using it in their application (even subconsciously). You don't want to get into plagiarism problems in your application!

6) Admissions people are really friendly if you call them and ask questions (politely of course)!

7) Don't be ashamed of asking your reference letter writers for letters even if it's more than one (to a reasonable extent). If you did a good job where you are asking for one, they won't mind! Plus most of the applications are similar and they can (for the most part aside from minor changes) copy and paste the letter for one school to another. Also, it also gives them a chance to do a rough draft for the first school due and then perhaps tweak it more and more to make it even better for later schools. I used the same references for all my schools personally (but remember OMSAS which were like 4 of mine were only one reference letter). So I only asked them to write about 3-4 (a reasonable amount imo). You may also want to bring up which is your top choice so that they can spend their time focusing on that one (don't be impolite by ordering them to focus on it, if you get the chance you may just want to mention that your top choice is the McMaster/OMSAS for instance).

What I didn't know, but wish I knew:

1) Med school IT systems suck! Don't wait till the last 5 minutes to submit your application, because chances are you are going to run into problems with the system crashing or it being so slow that you miss the deadline! It happened with a TON of applicants at a few universities last year (see pre-med101 rants). I had submitted an application at 10 pm (when it was due at midnight) and even then, I had to wait 5 mins for the page to load everytime I clicked something (literally). I'm not saying finish your application weeks in advance, just don't wait till the last 10-15 minutes to submit.

2) Start early!!! As in now!!! Don't wait till school starts and you have to balance midterms, extra-curriculars with applications. It'll make for one very sleepy, caffeine-high, peeved off pre-med!! Plus it will give you adequate time to find references and verifiers.

2) Med school application deadlines sometimes change. It won't be as bad as them changing the due date from say October 10 to August 22 (tomorrow) and notifying you on August 21st of the change, but keep aware of it and make sure you go back from time to time on the sites and keep track of the date.

3) Heard from friends: If you applied before, go into the admissions office, they often give you reviews of your past applications.

Questions/etc. Leave them in comment section with contact info (no phone numbers please, electronic contact only)

PS: Links to sites I found helpful note comments next to them though!

http://www.accepted.com/medical/sampleessays.aspx (more american essays but gives you a idea of how to write well!)

http://www.premed101.com/forums/index.php (o premed101 what would we do without you)

Shall post more if I remember more and if I find comments asking for more! Feel free to also request different advice columns in comments and I shall write on them in the future!

*shooting off in the night sky

-Black Comet

Problems with the New York Times 2-D Love Article

So... I'm sure many of you heard about the story in the New York Times entitled "Love in 2-D" already (I don't follow the New York Times, but I first heard about it from DarkMirage's site).

(Nemutan the described 2-D girl in the article)

To give it some context (courtesy of some wikipedia searches :P), the New York Times is "the largest metropolitan newspaper in the United States", has been around for over 100 years, and the online site received 18 million visitors in only one month (stats as of December 2008). It appalls me that they would publish such biased literary dribble. It seems that objectivity in news is a thing long dead... The link to the full article is here.

Summarizing the article, they basically talk about this guy (Nisan) who carries around a 2-D pillow case with him and treats her/it as if they were going out. He brings the pillowcase to restaurants and pretends as if they were two real people eating (he orders food for her/it as well). They drive together and he tries to be respectful of her (ensuring he does not touch any of her/it's private areas). Throughout the article, she keeps using keywords that signal pedophilia to the reader.

However, my issue is not with the fact that the article was written, the guy actually exists and the 2-D love phenomenon does exist. It's the fact that the writer took a small extremist subsect of otaku culture and wrote as if all of otaku culture matched this man.

As a fan of anime myself, I do not go around eating and driving with a pillow case whom I believe to be my wife. In fact, of all my friends who do watch anime, none would match the description that the article gives. I am sure that even if you have ever been to any cities with a significant asian population (ie. Vancouver, Toronto, Tokyo, Hong Kong), you would have never seen a man like Nisan. That is because, they aren't the normal otaku. Many of us aren't even into the 2-D girls and focus more on the mecha side of anime. Even those who are into 2-D girls are not as extreme as the guy described. Lots of western society isn't very knowledgeable about Otaku culture and anime in general.

In conclusion, I am just disappointed with such a large newspaper writing with a total lack of objectivity. The only thing the article achieves is to spread fear to its readers of Japanese subculture and create inaccurate stereotypes of otakus.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

So... everybody's who's anybody has probably at least heard of the 6th installment of the Harry Potter series coming to the big screen. I've read all the books in the series and consider myself a fan of the series, but not a serious enough fan to go and see it during the first week of it's release. I waited till a few days ago in order to avoid the massive 2 hour line ups.

**Warning Spoilers Ahead**

To be fully honest, I had forgotten a lot of the details of the book by now, so at least some elements of the movie were a surprise (of course, I still remember big plot lines such as the death of dumbledore "in snape's hands".

I sort of liked the introduction with showing us Harry and his interaction in the muggle world (in the cafe with the waitress)- not sure anymore if this was in the book?. My summer has been pretty boring so far, university summers tend to drag on forever!! (4 months). With medical school starting in fall, I cannot wait for the summer to end and for me to start up school again (this is the first time i've ever looked forward to school :P) and I could kind of relate to Harry. According to wizard rules, Harry wasn't able to use any of his magical abilities till school and spending his entire summer isolated from his friends in the muggle world must have been intensely frustrating! I've also wondered what his life in the muggle world during the summer was like, but we were never given much information about it (only the first chapter or so in the novels). If he perhaps lived a normal human life and did most of the things we do...

On a side note, I thought the cafe as the subway station was a kind of cool idea (although I'm not sure how safe it would be to work a midnight shift at a cafe like that...) Tons of times I am taking the subway late at night, when there are like 15-30 minute gaps between the trains and I would love to just sit down and maybe grab a cup of coffee while I wait.

There was very little filler content in this installment and we began to jump right into the action. The story kind of picks up and becomes a lot darker than the previous series, befitting the events unfolding in the story. Our characters begin to experience love and we see a lot more relationships in the movie as well. (Think back to Harry/Ron in the Goblet of Fire and the epic facepalm romantic moments). I don't know how many people would agree with me, but I also found it infinitely satisfying when Lavender finally got pwnt by Ron, after seeing her on screen for 10 or 20 minutes, I began to become really annoyed with her character.

Ginny and Harry finally hook up near the end of the movie and so do Hermoine and Ron. I think the first two were a good match in terms of personality but I am a little more skeptical of the last two. Hermoine and Ron seem on opposite ends of the world and I have no idea how they would interact with each other for a lifetime.

The one big surprise I did have was who the half-blood prince was. I didn't quite remember the identity of the prince (I read the novel way back when it first came out) and although I remembered it wasn't Voldemort/Tom Riddle, I couldn't quite nail down who it was.

**Warning 7th novel spoilers ahead**

Overall, I thought the movie was done fairly well, well spaced and done action scenes as well as a fairly good cast. However, I thought that the way Snape chatted with Dumbledore made it pretty obvious that there was a prior agreement for his killing Dumbledore, but that could just be because I knew that already.

I do genuinely enjoy the plot twist though. Throughout the first 5 novels, you would always be led to believe that Snape was the one responsible for the events of the novel and the reader always questioned Snape's true intentions. The sixth book almost satisfies all of them and I remember going "I knew it", but I ended up being blown out of the water in the seventh when Snape's entire character is revealed.

However, the last comment I wanted to leave was about the disappointment with the series as a whole. I felt the first few books were really genuine and were truly amazing but as time went along, it seemed the novels began to become loaded with fanfare. Additionally, the series had so much potential to become a work of literature and for JK Rowling to really say something about the human condition. I really thought that the series could have become something that people decades in the future could look back to and read in english class, something that may not have been Shakespeare level but at least on par with Mark Twain or Jane Austen. Instead she loaded the end of the series with a happily ever after ending that even the dimmest of readers could have easily predicted from book 5.

First Post

So, after a long while of intending to start a blog, I finally have. I decided not to get on the wordpress/blogger trains and use joomla (sadly, I can't do anything more basic than that... html, etc are way out of my scope) to make it. Bear with me while I begin to learn all the intracacies involved in joomla management :). Been trying to tweak around with the CSS, got some of the things done or figured out, but haven't been able to change everything yet! Namely, I can't seem to get rid of the little box ontop of all my posts. Will try and fix things up further in the future!