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[saidhello]

2019

When I re-read the post I made on here at the start of the year, I immediately thought, “Oh Kim. You sweet summer child. You had no idea how rough the rest of the year was going to be.” What a surprise it was that the final year of uni would be most challenging academic year I’d ever have.

...I guess it’s not that surprising -- but it definitely caught me off-guard. I studied. A lot. It was one of the first times I ever felt like I needed to sacrifice some play time with study time. Some troughs of the year were pretty deep and I definitely questioned what I was doing this for. To remind myself before internship starts next year, I want to write about the kind of doctor I’d like to be.

I’ve only looked up to two doctors. One was the GP I used to work for and the other was the junior registrar who supervised me when I was on cardiology. For both of them, they made their patients their top one priority. Every decision they made was so they could improve their patient’s lives, and that really showed through their work. They were always compassionate. On top of that, they were knowledgeable and efficient. Their ego never got in the way. Their personal goals never got in the way either.

From what I’ve seen during my placements, it’s easy for doctors to feel beat down by the hospital system, which to be fair can be a pretty rough system to work in. There are small things: rushing a conversation with a patient because they’re “too talkative”. Swearing under their breath at other health staff. I'd really like to avoid getting into an “us versus them” mantra. At the end of the day, the person sitting in front of you who is sick is your top priority. From what I saw from the GP and junior registrar, keeping this central belief inadvertently leads to you becoming a good doctor, and I’d really like to follow in their footsteps.

There are a lot of bad doctors out there. I gotta be one of the good ones.

~~~

Academic stuff aside, I started to paint with watercolours and it has been super fun to try my hand at some scenery. I got inspired by recently rewatching Avatar: TLR and LOK. Maybe I can work my way up and paint one of the air temples. The background paintings/art is incredible.

[saidhello]

It’s been a long time since I wrote anything on here. I’m in a really good place at the moment. I’ll finally be a working doctor next year and any family drama that existed a couple years ago has resolved for the better. I couldn’t ask to be around any better people than the friends I have now.

It’s really strange to walk past my old high school every day on the way to the hospital to study, and it makes me reflect on my time there. I lacked a lot of self-confidence and self-esteem back then, and I’m sure that’s something most teens struggle with. Anyway, since then, I feel like I’ve been able to experience so much more than what I imagined back in high school. Life outside the local library; life outside quads A and B; life outside going to the shared oval with the boys’ school. It’s crazy that that small plot of land was essentially my entire life for six years when the six years of life beyond that have been so incredibly rich.

Life’s good. I feel perfectly content.

[saidhello]

2017

This year has been wonderful in review. This was the first year of the degree I had been waiting 2 years for, and admittedly I had cold feet at the beginning. What if this commitment wasn’t something I could make? What if I didn’t like it? Now that it’s over, I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunities I had this year; to have genuine conversations with strangers about their lives, to improve my skills in problem-solving to actually help people. No other year has been so interesting academically, and I couldn’t imagine myself doing anything else. I actually want to read my textbooks before I sleep at night. This is a really refreshing feeling compared to good ol’ med sci, where I had no freakin’ clue what I was doing.

Thanks for the cool times 2017 :D

[saidhello]

Partial thoughts on travels abroad

For the second half of last year, I had the great opportunity to go on exchange to Vancouver, all the while exploring the west coast of the USA and east coast of Canada before and after a wonderful semester abroad. There’s something small in travelling I really enjoy, and it’s the chance encounters you have with certain strangers. I get that here sometimes, when I’m on the train to the city - some guy on the train the other day saw me reading George Orwell’s “1984″ and we started chatting about literature. It was a really nice encounter, but I digress.

While going from hostel to hostel, or catching Ubers in LA, I got to meet some really interesting people. While in Churchill, MB a.k.a. the middle of nowhere, we met a guy named Justin who was super nice. He was originally from Newfoundland, and was on his way to become a hairdresser in Vancouver but happened to stop by Churchill, love the culture, and became a professional Siberian husky racer. He drove us in his beat up truck to go pat 40 Siberian huskies, and got high on the drive there. Then he showed us his gloves made from the fur of a wolverine he had caught. BUT HE WAS STILL SUPER NICE, I PROMISE.

At the same time in Churchill, I got to befriend a nice author from New York who had started up his own publishing company, and he gave us a copy of his book. What I’m trying to get at is how such small encounters with other people impact you in a weirdly meaningful, quiet sort of way. I don’t know how to put it into words, but it really is lovely meeting people from every and any walk of life.

On another note, I finished 1984 and NO WINSTON NO ;_______;

[saidhello]

I don’t feel like I’m doing a lot right now with my life, though it is nice to be overseas and in Canada. I think I’ve gotten used to my exchange life so things aren’t particularly new anymore, but I’ve recently started learning a lot of random tidbits around the world. Mongolian history is really cool and Steppe tribes actually still wander about the plains. You can even join them and hang out as a nomad through some volunteer sites I’ve found, so I’m gonna do that one day and walk in the path of Genghis Khan. Minus all the pillaging, rape and general murder-y stuff he did. Maybe I’ll just do the horse-riding 8)

Anyway, since I’ve been here I’ve been able to meet a lot of people from all over the world and it’s insane how little I know- particularly, about Europe. A friend I met told me he was from Slovakia and I just thought it was another name for Austria. It’s its own country and I’m actually just an idiot. I’ve been learning about economics here and the conversations I’ve had with my roommate and European friends have been so insightful - they’ve taught me about the politics behind the UK and the EU, the economic tulip bubble long ago in the Netherlands, and made me realise how manipulated I am by the media. I thought it was really interesting when one of them brought up how there was a lot more emphasis on the situation in Syria when it started affecting European countries by causing the media-dubbed “greatest migrant crisis of all-time”. There’s so little I know about how the Syrian war evolved in all its complexity, and I’ve been learning about other conflicts like that in Libya, Cambodia, and Yemen. It’s easy to feel a lot of despair and I have no idea what I can do to help right now, except study and in maybe a decade’s time I’ll be a doctor and I can go over to help. My friends are getting paid internships with IBM and Microsoft and I haven’t even properly started my degree yet haha ha aha aha ahaha ah /melts into puddle

So that’s my quarter life crisis and I’m going to go study now

[saidhello]

Hey Kim, Congratulations! Do students start sorting out their timetable after they have accepted their main round offer? If so that means I should probably look at what majors and electives I want to choose right? Thank you :)

Yup! Make sure to plan it out thoroughly, to make sure you get the best timetable you can by the time it comes for you to enrol. Your uni life is heavily influeced by how your timetable is, especiailly in science/engineering courses because they have heaps more contact hours. Good luck!

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Hi Kim (or Dr Do in the future) :) Congratulations!! Was medicine something you considered in the beginning? can you tell me more about lateral entry, what is it and how it works?

Weirdly enough as a medical science student, no! I went into my degree hoping that I’d figure out what parts of medical science I liked - the research component, anatomy, whatever - and that by the end of it, I’d do post-graduate research, physiotherapy, radiography or medicine. It was open-ended and gave me time to figure out what I really wanted to do, but I loved my subjects in second year and in between seeing poor healthcare in the more rural parts of South Africa and the former, I found medicine to be the field I wanted to pursue.

Lateral entry is at UNSW, where those enrolled in a BMedSci can apply for it in second year. It’s based on your WAM, UMAT and interview, and if you get in you finish your BMedSci with Honours, and then take a bridging course over the holidays for clinical skills. Then you get to enter Year 4 of their undergraduate program, and by the end of a total of 7 years of studying, you’ll have your BMedSci (Honours), BMedSt and MD. Up to 15 people in your cohort can make it in, but it’s normally slightly less depending on the number of people who apply since not everyone does. It’s a pretty risky pathway, not going to lie!

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I've recently been reading "The Fabric of the Cosmos" by Brian Greene, and it's been one of the most enlightening books for me in terms of understanding the theoretical physics of the general universe. One of the really cool things I learnt was how objects further away from us are accelerating faster than objects that are closer to us - but that's not the cool part. First of all, some background. So, Einstein's theory of special relativity says that you can't MOVE THROUGH space at a speed greater than light. With an expanding universe though, space itself is what stretches, and galaxies remain "stationary". It's kind of like if I drew two dots on a balloon, and blew up the balloon. The dots never actually move - but they're further apart since the space between them has stretched. That's what happens in space, all around space, in three dimensions. Anyway, say a galaxy is at a tremendous distance from us. An incompresensible distance. And the further away galaxies are from us the faster they are "accelerating" away - there's more space between them, and so more space to expand. Because the galaxy isn't moving THROUGH space, but instead WITH space, the acceleration of the galaxy away from us exceeds the speed of light - and it still fits with Einstein's theory of relativity. The consequence of this? Since the galaxy is "moving away" from us faster than the speed of light, light is constantly trying to battle the distance to get from such a far galaxy to us - and it loses, because it can only travel at the speed of light. It's like if a marathon runner could only ever run 20 km/hr, but I keep adding an extra 40 km for him to run every hour. The light can't actually ever reach us, and that helps explain why space looks so dark when really there is so much STUFF, so much MATTER in the universe that can emit light. And that's one of the coolest things I've learnt from reading this novel.

[saidhello]

Hi, do you have any advice for students starting university this year as it'll be very different from high school? Thanks :)

If you were to scroll through my tumblr a few pages you'll find another anonymous who asked this question and I wrote a fair bit for you guys :) For the most part, embrace the transition with a good attitude. Don't get too caught up in hating the change. Good luck with university this year homie!

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I found out yesterday that I made it into UNSW medicine via lateral entry, and it's been surreal. Things have gone so well this year - I got an internship in histology, exchange to my first preference university, a travel scholarship and acceptance into studying medicine. The universe has been incredibly good to me; I have close friends I care about and so on. I need something to keep me grounded though, so I'm going to buy a bracelet or something as a symbol to remind me to stay humble and grateful to everything that's happened.

A big thing that makes me really emotional is remembering each person in med sci who ever told me they thought I could make it, that they were sure I'd get lateral. They had a good opinion of me and believed I could when I didn't think so; whether it was true or not, I'm glad I could live up to what they thought I could be. I spent the entirety of yesterday essentially crying, and I know it's not a big thing to some people or that I'm maybe being really dramatic about it, but my family's told me they were proud of me. So have really close friends; it all means a lot.

I'm gonna stop writing now before I cry again okay goodbye

[saidhello]

GIRLLLLLLLLL congrats on lateral :)

THANKS SO MUCH TOAN :') x

[saidhello]

Hi.

Hello my dear friend :3

[saidhello]

So I'm currently doing a summer course in Greek mythology, and one of the tasks was to write about your personal Ithaca. The response I have is something I do really believe in as cheesy as it is, but I just wanted to save what I wrote.

In first realising a personal Ithaca, one should first define what Ithaca in its portrayal by the poet Homer truly indicates. In its setting in the Odyssey, Odysseus is constantly thwarted from reaching the very world he calls home as Poseidon sends various obstacles his way; whether it be by earthquakes, influences by the nymph Calypso or even sirens, Odysseus is an enduring character as he overcomes every hurdle he encounters - all in the name of his grand memory of Ithaca. It is his great pursuit as he longs to return to the acceptance and familiarity extended by his people and own family; he seeks to return to Penelope and see how his young son Telemachus has matured.

However, it is important to note that Odysseus has been away for years, and Ithaca has long-changed: his palace is overrun with suitors, and is left in a state that Odysseus may find unrecognisable with the exception of his old dog; his own wife barely recognises him initially. With this in mind, the Ithaca Odysseus really seeks to return to is his own idealistic, grand abstract of home, not necessarily the place itself. It is his individual sense of home, a sense of belonging that stems from within and makes a lasting impression on his mind that he seeks as his “Ithaca”. In defining Ithaca as the grand goal at the end of a long-winded journey where one at last feels at peace with themselves, my personal Ithaca would be to become an appreciative, well-rounded individual.

The state of existence on the Earth is already incredible, and the feat of being self-aware as humans is a concept I have long appreciated. With each life that has been a part of the continuum of people we call the human race, generational knowledge has been passed down. It has accumulated to form firm establishments in physics, chemistry, biology and understanding one another in disciplines from anthropology to archaeology. The fact is that there is a vast world of knowledge to be understood; insights from past people that can lead to a greater appreciation of the world around us. With respect to each life that has existed, there is something to learn from every single one; each brings you closer to being a better-rounded individual that immerses themselves in the opportunity of being alive at this very moment. It leads to a better understanding of the surrounding world, and knowing that I have tried for the entirety of my life - not having a moment wasted - is my personal Ithaca; I will have a sense of home in the universe around me as well as being satisfied with who I worked towards to become. It is a mental journey as opposed to the revolutionary epic undertaken by Odysseus; nonetheless, it is an Ithaca.

Of course, this comes with challenges as conceptual frameworks from different disciplines are difficult to grasp. Currently, in recently developing an understanding of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, wrapping my mind around the effect gravity has on space-time is complex. Nonetheless, relentless perseverance through such ideas mirrors how Odysseus endures the challenges given to him; the epic journey he goes through to feel at home is mirrored in that my end goal is not something I am willing to give up so quickly. It is actually this end goal that has motivated me to study Greek mythology; it is doubtless that understanding ancient stories that have had an enduring impact on the Western world will enrich my understanding of ambient culture. As I study a representative of the social sciences, or understand Einsteinian concepts, I ever so gradually defeat another siren that is a part of my very own personal Ithaca.

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I've been having this thought for a while now, how a lot of people feel like their childhood was yesterday or that the past few years have felt like an instant. I don't know how to entirely explain it, but I just think it's interesting to think it's because in the most abstract way, the world as we know it really only does exist as an instant. The single world we are in right now is all that exists in one single moment, before wind howls or a wave crashes. In a rapid cascade that happens one millisecond to the other, our world is lost and reformed - as is the mind that experiences it. It's like if I could only pause on a single frame of a video before it's lost again, and so you have a singular effect that your life really has gone by in an instant as each moment we get slips through our fingers; few moments are privileged to be caught in our memory.

Another thought I had was that If relativity says time can go backwards, it's something we'll never be able to know. It's an obvious idea, I know, but to really time travel to the past with that sense of awareness it would require a solidified experience of our present. Sort of like if there was an ever-expanding cone of knowledge and experience: a later point in its whole would have to visit an earlier point - but we can't, because as we travel backwards our experiences are lost and return to the so-called naivety of the earlier state. I don't know how to articulate this idea without having it sound like nonsensical, obvious ramblings.

Anyway, today I saw two ends of a storm and visited a lighthouse and that as pretty good

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So recently rewatched The Last Airbender movie. I think I'm going to tear-bend.

Sorry what

That movie does not exist

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Hi Kim, (sorry I know this isn't a HSC help blog but I have no one else to ask and you have such a positive outlook towards things I guess I'm hoping it rubs off) I don't know why but my brain is freezing during exams. I definitely know my content but I don't know what I should do. Do you think there is such a thing as over studying? I've been coming first at school and I don't want my effort to reflect poorly.

HAHA It's okay! I don't think it's so much you over-studying; it's more like you're really stressed and you're putting a lot of pressure on yourself (naturally as the HSC is your final school exam). I think you need to find some sort of balance between the HSC and being relaxed, so loosen up and let yourself go have fun or something. Playing guitar helped me so much during; the HSC was actually one of times I played guitar most. When I was overly stressed I'd go to the library to see my friends and """study""" (by which I mean I did like 3 math questions over the course of 5 hours. That productivity though).

Anyway, just trust yourself. You've been coming first in school so you're definitely capable/confident; there's definitely time to spare for you to develop a balance. Don't burn out though ok home bb

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My daughter has not seen her biological dad since she was four. She’s 11 now. When she was two he contacted me and asked if I would allow him to terminate his parental rights so he could stop paying child support and I agreed.. I wanted to spare her the heartache of a revolving door father and the sacrifice of the financial support was well worth him never being able to disappoint her again. I never lied to her about where he went or who her dad was.. I have always answered her questions in the most age appropriate way possible. When she was four he contacted me and told me he has been diagnosed with cancer and would like to see her. I set aside a day and we met in the park. He had asked for two hours. He stayed 20 minutes and we never heard from him again.. Over the summer we ran into somebody that knows him and they commented on how she looks like his other children. They elaborated that he has settled down and has a family now. My stomach tied itself in knots thinking of how hurtful that must be to my daughter.. I cut the conversation short and we got in the car to leave and that’s when I saw her smiling. She said “mom.. He figured out how to be a dad. That’s such a nice thing. I’m happy for his kids.” And that’s the day an 11 year old taught me all I need to know about forgiveness.

A comment on this Humans of New York post (via wordsthat-speak)