November: Thanks Giving and Thanks Taking

Hey everyone.

I just wanted to start this post out talking about November. Since I was a kid, I always associated this entire month with one particular Thursday: Thanksgiving. My parents moved to Orlando from Bangladesh in the 90s, and thanksgiving is always a tradition at our household, including my large family (my dad is 1 of 10 siblings!). It's always fun, and it's the one day of the year my mom cooks more American type food. Even so, she manages to put her own spice to it! Literally... just look at that turkey! She made two and this was the second one. 



Also in this month was one of my strongest med pharm performances. Med pharm is the highest weight class, and it felt very good to get an A in the module which Dr. Clarkson called the "Mother" of all of our content modules! It feels amazing when studying pays off, and I wholeheartedly enjoy the feeling more than just about (almost) anything I do.. despite how stressful the process of studying can be.

This was also the month I got on top of my service hours. I participated in the edible forest project, which is meant to plant fruitful trees on the front yards of New Orleans residents. It was fascinating for me, a lifelong Orlando resident to see how people in New Orleans live. The people are good hearted despite all the adversity they must put up with. It was a great feeling to help people be able to potentially have a free source of healthy fruit and vegetables down the line. I also participated in volunteering two times for second harvest aiding in sorting dry food to be shipped out. It was nothing glamorous, but I felt it was appropriate given the time of year, and felt a sense of accomplishment in aiding in food distribution to the people of this city who need it the most!


just look at this table! chicken and beef curry on the side for any uncles and aunts not in the mood to step outside our usual food boundaries.

November Service Hours: 12.5

Total Service Hours: 12.5


-Ujaan

Advances, and the Future

One of the courses we have to take here at the Tulane Masters in Pharmacology program is the advances in pharmacology course, which is every Wednesday at noon. It involves being with a group of students and being assigned a "landmark paper" in the field of pharmacology, in other words a paper containing studies or trials concerning medicine which establishes the profoundness of their indications, relevance, side effects, and contraindications.

Something of note is that the paper assigned is always relevant to what is being covered in the current module in class. So recently, I have gone to present for two weeks in a row and both of my papers that I was assigned covered various antihypertensive drugs, such as valsartan, nebivolol, candesartan, and hydrochlorothiazide. Something I find useful about this class is that it can either reenforce or introduce me to a topic that will be of relevance come test day and help me keep up with the material better.

In the future months, I need to up my service hours greatly. I focus too much on studying when the tests roll around, and not enough on serving the community when the tests are farther away. This is something I need to change and it's time to do what I can to change that.



example of what we've observed in an advances paper, detailing the effects of monotherapy vs multi drug therapy

service hours: 0
total: 0...

The Interesting Case of Penicillins

A lot has happened in my life in the last month, leaving my home state of Florida to live on my own for the first time in a beautiful historic city known as New Orleans. I have more to say than I have time to type right now concerning my opinions about Tulane, the city, and my life in general, but I am going to use this blog to write about something more interesting than all of that: penicillins.

It is interesting to note the differences in penicillins, whether it's the natural penicillins V and G, which have narrow spectrum of activity against both gram positives and gram negatives. Also noteworthy is how a different class of penicillins, which includes piperacillins and ticarcillins only affect gram negative bacteria... completely enticing!

But in all honesty, it really is intriguing how diverse the mechanisms and properties of the different classes (natural, anti-staph, amino, anti-pseudomonal) of penicillins are. It reminds me of another beta-lactam drug family: the cephalosporins...


Penicillin G itself.

-Ujaan
Service hours in September: 0
Total service hours: 0