Every week I send out an update to the medical school, which gets send out as part of WGW (What's Good Wednesday), an email where the associate deans of students compiles the professional and academic accomplishments and life events of the student body in an effort to help keep us connected even though we are spread out across lecture halls, campuses, and hospitals across the state. Usually populated by sporadic submissions of significance, after talking with friends before I left, I decided to twist the format to suit my needs to stay connected to my class. After the fifth week of consistent submission, my update was given it's own special place and title: Kassel's Corner.
Happy Holidays from the UK! Kassel Galaty (#themedicalstudentformelyknownasMed20) forgot to send in her update last week because the term had officially ended and there was no longer any external indications of what day of the week it was. Weekdays blurred into weekends blurred into missed WGW deadlines. But in this two week interim MUCH has been done to maintain sanity and entertain.
She went to her first Cambridge ball--the Selwyn Snowball where the theme was Planetarium, the food and drink runneth over (they call cotton candy candy floss!), and the Cambridge band Colonel Spanky's Love Ensemble stole her heart and steamed up the room.
She returned to Anglesey Abbey to see the Christmas decorations, this time exploring the inside of the house, where it harkened back to a time when the china was locked behind a literal safe and one ordered things like "Invalid Turtle Soup." (Note the royal autographs carved into the window glass with a diamond tipped pen).
The weather has been much sunnier than the traditional PNW winter and her return visits to the Botanical gardens and Grantchester did not disappoint.
She stopped in at the Wellcome Library in London on her most recent trip (no national archives this time!) and saw an amazing petri dish video, as well as many other historical medical artifacts (all of which had mildly disturbing elements to them).
In unphotographed news there has been much holiday merriment, good conversations into the night (these philosophers, man), mulled wine, eggnog, and, believe it or not, she's even started to like minced pies (it helped that she finally got to eat some homemade ones). Being here for the election was a bit of a bummer and eerily reminiscent of a November three years ago. No one she talked to was surprised by the result, they were just disappointed. But in case you've been wondering, asking British people about Brexit has not brought any clarity to the matter. They don't get it either.
Academically, the term is over but the reading has only just begun. If you're looking for holiday reads, a couple of books she'd like to recommend are Deep Medicine by Eric Topol about the future role of AI in medicine, Living Professionalism edited by Erin A. Egan which has several great essays (particularly one about the generational differences/conflict about what constitutes medical professionalism), and A Question of Trust by Onora O'Neill about whether there actually is a crisis of trust in the modern day and age.
Hope you all have a wonderful break from residency interviews and have happy holidays, preferably with mulled wine (because it's genuinely the best thing ever). Stay tuned until 2020, when Kassel will once again resume writing about herself in the third person. Please enjoy this very British sign:
Cheers!
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