A Quick Update

It’s been so long since I posted, so I just wanted to let everyone know that I’m still alive.  I’ve just been insanely busy.  A major project at work decided to bite like a cobra, so I’ve been on the road a decent amount and have been working crazy hours for the past couple of months.  I’m also deep in work on my committee letter application and, by extension, my medical school application.  I’m trying to put in an hour or two a night writing essays, but I’m not necessarily getting that in every night.  I have another 7 weeks before my committee letter applictaion is due, then I can start working on assembly my personal statement.  One of the essays I’ve been asked to write is probably going to morph into my personal statement I think.

I’m still working on that research project with a local physician and I’m hoping to have a draft ready by the end of February.  Quite a steep learning curve figuring out some of the statistics.  SAS / JMP works really well, once you know what to ask it for.  If you don’t, then you can stare at the screen for a while and not have a clue.  Luckily, the doctor I’m working with is really knowledgeable of statistics and very patient.

Anyway, hope you all are well.  I check in here every day and I can see that, from my search summary, a lot of visitors are getting started studying for the MCAT.  Best of luck to you all.  I’m also better about checking email these days.  Thanks again for reading guys.  It’s nice to know others are out there swimming against the current as well.

And now, back to work.

An Update on the School Search

Hi everyone – hope you all had a great holiday. Happy Thanksgiving!

I’ve spent the majority of the past 3-4 days researching schools and have whittled the list down to these.  I don’t think I could give numerical ranks to them, so I’ve grouped them into three different tiers.  Some of you have contacted me through email or have left comments and I really appreciate it.  Location is sort of a big deal for me, so if any of you have lived in any of these cities, I’d love to hear what your experience has been.  Here they are in no particular order.

Top Tier:

Stanford University School of Medicine
University of Colorado School of Medicine
University of Washington School of Medicine
University of Minnesota Medical School
Duke University School of Medicine
Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine

Middle:

University of Michigan Medical School
Mayo Medical School
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine
University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health
Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine
University of Virginia School of Medicine
Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth
Baylor College of Medicine

Bottom:

University of Arizona College of Medicine
University of Kansas School of Medicine
University of Nebraska College of Medicine
University of Utah School of Medicine
Medical College of Wisconsin
Yale University School of Medicine

Thoughts on Schools

Hey everyone.  Hope you guys are all well.

I’ve started down the path to selecting medical schools to apply to and I figured that I had winnowed the list to a thin enough crew to warrant asking for some of your thoughts on schools.  I don’t know a lot of people in the non-blogosphere that go to any of these schools, so I’m hoping you guys can give me some additional insight.

The initial criteria for me is location – if I’m going to live in one location for 7-8 years, it needs to be someplace where I’m not going to go crazy.  I’m not going to live in a tiny 1 bedroom apartment deep in the heart of NYC and I have no plan on living in the deep south.  The Dr. Lady, who has a heavy influence here, has helped me reduce the list of places to apply to the following locations:

Stanford University
University of Colorado
Loyola University
Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine
University of Kansas
University of Michigan
University of Minnesota
Mayo Medical School
Creighton University
University of Nebraska
Darthmouth (she is really not a fan of this one)
University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill
Duke University
Oregon Health Sciences
Meharry Medical College
Vanderbilt University
University of Utah
Baylor College of Medicine
University of Vermont
University of Washington
Medical College of Wisconsin
University of Wisconsin

I’m strongly considering a dual MD / PhD degree and I would really like to wind up working in academia after I’m finished with everything. I’d really appreciate your thoughts on these locations. Some of these places I’m familiar with, but others are a complete mystery to me. Dartmouth, Duke University, and Vanderbilt are all places that look to have fine academic programs, but I have no idea what life is like there. What do you guys think?

Thoughts on Preparing for the MCAT

I apologize that it’s taken me this long to get a post up on how I studied for the MCAT. I’ve been really busy with work lately and, to be perfectly frank, I’ve more or less forgotten about the MCAT entirely.  Although, last night I did have a nightmare that there was a second entrance exam for medical school that I didn’t know about. The weird thing was that it consisted of fighting vampires and lycans, along with a substantial amount of platforming. I’m not going to lie – I’ve been playing a lot of Castlevania and Deus Ex on my Playstation over the past few months.

As much fun as all of that is, I want to lay out my thoughts on preparing for the MCAT for several reasons. First, I feel somewhat obligated to all those that came before me for sharing their thoughts and experience. In particular, I really should single out the long-running thread on SDN which provided me with the framework I used to structure my study time. Second, I’d like to help others that are going to be taking the exam and hopefully help them avoid some of the mistakes that I see a lot of students make. Finally, one of the things I hope to do is encourage those of you out there that haven’t put the exam in the rearview yet. One of the things that I learned about the MCAT, or studying for any professional school exam for that long, is the huge emotional roller coaster you’ll be on. I’ve got some thoughts on this at the end.

With all that said, let’s dive in. Let me qualify my remarks here a bit – most of this is really oriented for people that will be taking the exam in its current format. The MCAT is scheduled to undergo a major overhaul in a couple of years, so if you aren’t taking it for 3-4 years, not all of what I have to say will be directly applicable to you.

First, some general advice on how to be successful on the exam:

• Focus on learning the material in the classes. This probably gets mentioned (and ignored) more than any other piece of advice, but it is absolutely true. The worst thing you can do for yourself is obsess about your grade and not learn the material. There will undoubtedly be a couple of topics that you need to learn from scratch for the exam, but if you don’t know anything about physiology and want to prepare for the exam, you have some hard yards ahead of you.
• Don’t start reviewing for the MCAT until you have taken all the prerequisite material. This is really just a restatement of my earlier comment, but it gets all the time by premeds. There are people that do it, but I suspect that they are less than satisfied with their MCAT scores.
• Do not take the MCAT until you know you can and will be ready to take it. I have personal experience with this – two summers ago, I was studying for the exam and after about 10 weeks started realizing that I wasn’t read and was having to learn a lot of new material. I concluded that I really needed some time to fill in the holes, so I took a year long graduate biochemistry sequence and a semester each of physiology and genetics. It set my application back by a year, but there is no doubt in my mind that my score on the MCAT was all the better for it.
• Do not get impatient and decide to take the exam earlier than when you will be ready. A bunch of my classmates did this and wound up with mediocre scores because of it. In one case, a friend of mine scored something in the mid-20s and it completely derailed his application.
• Do not adopt the attitude of “I’ll take it to see how I do”. MD schools see all of your attempts, so don’t be a fool here. One shot. One kill.

Here’s my opinion on prep courses.

• They are expensive and, in my opinion, often give students a false sense of preparedness. A lot of students I’ve seen take a prep course during the spring and prepare to sit the exam thinking they are ready when in reality they are not.
• They force a schedule upon you which may or may not be beneficial. A prep course for me would have been a huge waste of time because it would have spent ages in physics and molecular biology, none of which would have been necessary for me. In hindsight, I could have probably reviewed MCAT physics in a few sessions. On the other hand, I really needed to spend a couple of days on electrochemistry because it was something I had never covered. Prep courses typically do not have the flexibility to do that sort of thing.
• For some people, particularly those that are not able to rigorously stick to a review schedule, prep courses may make sense. If you cannot discipline yourself to study and review at the appropriate time, a prep course might help you out.
• One final thought on prep courses. If you take one and it helps you review, that’s great. But it’s only part of the game. You have to do practice exams under actual exam conditions. There were people I knew that showed up to take the exam with me and I was shocked how many of them took a prep course and had only done one practice exam. Unwise.

Now onto prep material. As I mentioned a while ago, I don’t think that the material is really the determinant for doing well. I believe practicing questions under timed conditions and heavy review is the key to success. That said, here are my thoughts on the different review systems out there:

• Kaplan – Their subject review material is absolutely terrible and riddled with errors. I’ve heard that the material available in their classes is better, but I’ve not seen those. Also, their ‘MCAT in a Box’ is a giant waste of money.
• Princeton Review – Didn’t use any of this, although their Hyperlearning series is rather legendary from what I have heard.
• ExamKrackers – I felt their content review was rather cursory and I found myself constantly needing to supplement it, particularly with their chemistry section.  Their verbal review book was fantastic and, as much as I hate to admit it, their Audio Osmosis series helped tremendously with knowing the things which were going to be covered on the exam and what I could safely ignore.
• The Berkeley Review – Hands down the best review materials I used. The format of their passages is really well suited to timing and learning to think the way the MCAT requires. I will say that their material is far over the top – if you use the Berkeley Review, do not let it get you discouraged when you wind up missing half the questions on practice passages.  I attribute my success on the exam in no small part to the fact that I got hammered on a regular basis by the passages in those books, particularly the biology book.

Now we get to the meat of how to make a study schedule and stick to it. As I mentioned, I heavily leveraged what was recommended on SDN, so if you want more details, check it out there.

• Register for the exam and know when and what date you will be taking it.
• Figure out how much time you have to devote to the exam. 3 months is very aggressive if you have a full-time job or other responsibilities. 4 months of studying worked well for me but you need to schedule a lot of break days, or you will get burnt to a cinder. I was ready to be done after about 10 weeks or so. People that talk about hardcore studying for 6 months are lying. Anything more than 4 months and you’re going to be a crispy critter come exam day.
• Set a tangible and realistic goal for yourself. Some people set their goal to be a 40 or a 45. To me, this is foolish. Something like only 8 people out of 1000 score over a 40 and no one gets a 45. My goal was a 35 and I would have been pleased if I’d wound up with a 34, but a little disappointed. Happily, as it turned out, that didn’t happen. Make sure that your goal is realistic, but not something you’ll be devastated by if you miss it by a point or two.
• Count backwards about 4 weeks and schedule the 8 practice AAMC exams, leaving at least two days in between to review the exam and do practice questions as review. Also, make sure to schedule a day off every week or so – for me, burnout set in after about 12 weeks and I really needed time to unwind occasionally, or I was going to go crazy.
• Count backwards another 3 months and fill in your study schedule. I found that doing the practice exams after the review was far more beneficial than doing them once my content review was complete. Not everyone does it this way, but it worked for me.
• Don’t let the exam consume you.  You could literally spend the rest of your life studying the concepts tested on the MCAT.  Anyone that thinks they understand all of this stuff completely is kidding themselves.
• A lot of people, after the fact, will look back and say “I really shouldn’t have worried about it so much” or “Put the MCAT in perspective”.  I think that’s a bunch of crap because for 3-4 months of your life, it really needs to be the most important thing under the sun.  That’s a crappy deal, I know, and yeah, it isn’t the only part of your application.  But let’s face it – schools screen based in large part on your MCAT score.  I’m not going to say “I shouldn’t have worried about it so much” now.  I crushed the MCAT mostly because I DID worry about it so much.  I didn’t ride my bike for 4 months.  I didn’t get to hang out with friends much during that time either.  I’m not saying you should live like a monk or anything like that – I drank my share of beer and played a lot of Oblivion – but if you want to give yourself the best chance to do well on the thing, don’t listen to anyone telling you to relax or not worry about the MCAT.  I know lots of people that weren’t worried about their MCAT performance.  I did a lot better than they did.

For studying, I would set a 50 minute timer and focus on getting good work done. After 50 minutes, I would take a 10 minute break, check my email, talk to the Dr. Lady, and get something to eat or drink. Then I’d go back and repeat. I found that studying at the office after everyone had left to be very effective. The only times I went to the coffee shop were when I wanted coffee. There were people there with their MCAT books and I marvel that they were able to get anything done.

Once you’ve gotten started, understand that, regardless of the time you set aside, you will fall behind. You have to keep going. As you start doing more passages and reviewing them, particularly if you adopt a cyclical approach to studying, you will find that you wind up filling in a lot of holes, so don’t get hung up on getting every problem worked or every detail figured out.

If you want more detail on how I actually studied, as in the day-to-day work, check out the SDN post on MCAT studying or feel free to ask in the comments or in an email.

The emotional part of the process is what I really wanted to talk about. I was unprepared for the constant ups and downs of the process. I remember missing questions, not understanding a particular concept, or making mistakes and I realize now that I let it negatively affect me when it came to working passages or taking the practice exams. Probably one of the most important things to learn is confidence and it only comes with time. This is part of the reason why I recommend against practice exams prior to review or a ‘diagnostic exam’. The last thing you want the day of the exam is to be thinking about all the questions you missed or the mistakes you made on practice exams.

I had planned to write a lot more about my thoughts on preparing for the exam, but ultimately I think each person needs to tailor something that will work for them. I was pleased with the approach that I took and how the results turned out.

On a personal note, I really need to say thanks to a few people.  First, the Dr. Lady.  She help me keep going when I scored below the multiple guess rate on a set of biology passages (yes, the Berkeley Review is that hard) and reminded me of good performances when I needed to hear it.  My buddy Little Ben for making sure we got together for a beer once every month or so, lest I forget that life exists outside of the exam.  And lastly, I really need to say thanks to all of you guys for the encouragement over the past year.  Knowing that all of you were waiting for practice exam results made it a lot easier to struggle through all those practice passages.  Hopefully, the application cycle will work out alright and I’ll find myself looking back with another milestone in my rearview.  Thanks!

Apparently the MCAT is Important

The head of the premed committee at my institution had quite a few things to say to me earlier this week. He seemed to think that a big MCAT score on the board was something of a gamechanger and altered the way that I should look at schools. Apparently, my exam score, GPA, letters of recommendation, and research / work experience give me a very strong application and, assuming I don’t tank my interviews, he felt confident I was going to have my pick of several offers next year. When I asked about schools he was thinking would be wise to apply to, he started spouting off places like UCSF, UCSD, Stanford, Duke, Johns Hopkins, and so forth. I was really taken back because for the last two years I’ve know him, every time I walked out of his office I felt like he thought I was a joke. His inability to tell people what they want to hear is legendary. This time I went to see him, I heard phrases like “Run like the wind” quite a bit. From his perspective, I have a significant opportunity here which a lot of people don’t normally have.

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking with the physican I’ve been doing research with. We were talking about some of my goals in medicine and I told her that I really wanted to wind up at an academic institution, with a significant amount of teaching and collaboration. She asked me if I had considered the MD / PhD route. I remarked that I had considered a PhD several times since I graduated and that I had turned it down because I felt that it really narrowed ones focus and that sort of turned me off to it. In her opinion, that is a flawed understanding of the way that the dual-degrees function in medicine. In the medical field, the dual-degree functions in a somewhat different manner than it does in the hard sciences and doesn’t necessarily constrain someone to one very narrow slice of the profession. Additionally, from her perspective, dual-degrees among the faculty of most institutions is becoming more the rule rather than the exception. This of course got me thinking, because every one of my professors and classmates has asked me why I’ve not considered the dual-degree. Well, now I am.

This is all rather strange for me. Up until now I’ve been thinking of myself and my candidacy for medical school from the perspective of an underdog. I think that may be a bit of a mistake – if there is an opportunity here, I don’t want to waste it.

With that as a bit of prologue, I have a couple of questions that I’d like to crowd-source some advice on.

• Is a dual-degree (or an MD with a post-doc or fellowship) more or less the standard approach for a person with my goals?
• What are the most important aspects of a combined program to consider?
• Are there limits on what fields a person is able to pursue their PhD in?
• In general, what advice would you give to someone in my position looking at selecting schools to apply to, both for MD and MD-PhD programs?

If any of you guys have some advice, I’d love to hear it. Thanks.

Today, Life is Good

I’ve spent the last 30 minutes at work pacing the hallways sending out zillions of text messages to everyone I know.  The Doctor Lady is on a plane back from a conference, so she will unfortunately be the last to know.  Thanks to all of my friends out there on the internet and everywhere else for your encouragement – reading about your success and reminded that there is light at the end of the tunnel was invaluable.

Enough gilding the lily.  Here they are everyone:

Physical Sciences: 14
Verbal Reasoning:  11
Writing Sample: Q
Biological Sciences: 14
Composite Score: 39Q

I know this is just a step along the way – granted, a big one – but I’m going to try and remember today.  Today, life is good.

The Calm Before the Storm

MCAT scores get released tomorrow at 3:15 EDT.  I will be at work in a meeting for almost the entire day, so there will probably be some sort of emotional outburst.  Some friends and I are going to hit up a local pub after work to imbibe some celebratory libations. I’ll post a screenshot of my scores tomorrow afternoon, hopefully before the brews start flowing too freely.

Here’s the story thus far:

Mean PS: 13.1
Mean VR: 10.0
Mean BS: 11.8
Mean Composite: 34.9
Predicted: 34
Goal: 35

More Search Terms..

The search terms for today were rather humorous, so I figured that I would share.

undergrade majors for med school

There are many. If you’re going to spend four years in college studying something, you should study something that you actually enjoy. Just a thought

average engineering mcat

Not as high as physics.

organic chemistry medical school

Probably important to biochemistry, but the applicability of things like the Diels-Alder reaction are somewhat limited in medical school. But you never know…if I’m ever an attending, I totally intend to pimp my residents on the finer points of acid-base chemistry.

how hard is it to get into medical school

If I’m accepted into medical school the first year I apply, it will have taken me longer to get into medical school than it will take me to complete medical school. So, yeah. It’s hard to get into medical school.

medical school is not hard

How nice for you. I’m sure others do not share your sentiment.

why is medical school so hard

Probably because you don’t study the right way.

who gets into stanford medical school

Interesting question. I have a friend that is attending Stanford right now and had below average MCAT and GPA, but was accepted there and many other places. You spend five minutes in a room with the guy and you can’t help but wish he was your physician. He’s the proof that grades and MCAT are not the only things important in the med school journey.

And my personal favorite….

address of edward cullen residency

Seriously?!?  This linked you to my site?  How on earth could I possibly be related to a bunch of loser vamps drenched in sparkles?!?

I’m deeply offended that this somehow linked you to my website. Go watch some Buffy or Angel. If you really want to scratch the vampire itch, try watching Supernatural. This Edward Cullen business makes no sense to me.

Anyway, I’ve got a bunch of work-related stuff to take care of this week, but I’d like to post something about MCAT preparations this weekend.  Stay tuned.

The Main Event

So, let’s get to the goods.  I took the MCAT yesterday afternoon as planned – no issues with the testing facility or anything like that.  Although, I did leave two hours early in case I got pulled over – I haven’t had a chance to renew my license plates since January and I was worried that, with my luck, I’d get nailed on the way to the testing center and show up late.

For those of you that haven’t taken the MCAT yet, examinees are prohibited from discussing specifics of the exam, so I can’t give any specifics out about the exam.  That said, I still have plenty to unload.  Understand that, right now, I’ve got a couple of imperial stouts onboard, so this should be a rather free-wheeling post.

Up front, let me be clear, anyone that thinks to take the MCAT without having taken all of the AAMC practice exams is a complete fool.  Taking the full-lengths under timed conditions and then reviewing them afterwards is the most important part of preparing for the exam.  Having a sense of the timing required is absolutely crucial and the only to develop that is by taking the practice exams.  I also did timed MCAT-style practice passages the entire time I was studying for the exam, and I really think this helped me get used to doing questions under test conditions.  As it turned out, even with all that, the timing on the real thing was auite a bit different than I had expected.

First, the physical science section was not all that different from the ones that I encountered on the practice exam.  In hindsight, I’m somewhat glad that I tanked this section on the last practice exam I worked.  There were two questions that really stumped me and I was relatively sure I had worked out answers, so I gave what I thought was the correct answer, marked it, and then went on to the next one.  I had about 4 minutes left at the very end and was able to go back and verify that I had the correct answer.  If I hadn’t gotten snagged on the timing that one time on the practice exam, I could have very easily burned too much time on those and not finished the section.  As it turned out, I’m pretty sure that I did fairly well on this section.  There were several very crafty passages that were easy, so long as you really knew the physics, but if you didn’t, would definitely leave you facedown in the dirt.

Now, for the verbal.  Really glad that I practiced these as much as I did.  The VR section was absolutely nothing like the practice exams.  First, the length of every practice passage I did was around 600 words or so.  On the real thing, the first three passages were easily 1200-1300 words.  Huge.  And the first few passages were aboslutely brutal.  I fell behind a bit on the first passage because of the length, so I stepped up the pace and got caught up by the third passage.  I never felt all that pressed for time and actually finished up about 6 minutes early.  The last few passages really cruised and I found myself reading the questions, reading the answers, bubble the right answer, and then cruising on to the next one.  Hopefully, that’s a good sign, but it’s hard to really know one way or the other.  On several questions, I knew exactly what the distractors were and felt confident that I was sidestepping the landmines that the test writers had lain.  As always though, it’s really tough to feel confident about any of these.  Hopefully I was able to score at least a 10 on this section.

The writing sample was more or less a break from the stress.  I sort of just tuned out the fact that I was taking the MCAT, relaxed, and acted like I was writing a blog post on whatever random topic they had assigned me.  What was interesting was talking with some of the other examinees.  I ran into a guy from one of my post-bacc courses who took one practice exam a couple months ago.  Another girl had taken the exam three weeks ago and scored something like a 25.  I was amazed at the super-gunner atmosphere there too – everyone that I interacted with were humongous douchebags.  I talked to one girl between sections and then wished her luck, and she acted like I’d tried to feel her up.  Those are the kinds of people that I want nothing to do with in medical school.

Finally, the biology section.  A lot of premeds count on the MCAT to not test much organic chemistry and many do not review it to any significant degree.  Big mistake.  There were at least three passages on organic chemistry, mostly first semester stuff.  There was also a rather nasty passage that asked a couple of questions that took me about 20 minutes to work out once I got home and had access to a biochemistry textbook.  Luckily, I didn’t let those questions trip me up – I gave them my best educated guess, marked them, and then came back to them.  There was one question on stereochemistry that I marked to come back to make sure that I hadn’t made some silly mistake.  As it turned out, I had, so I reworked it several times to make sure that I was correct, changed my answer, and then finished up the section.

After I finished up, there was the obligatory survey, where I just sorta relaxed and reflected on the exam.  My first thought after I was finished was that I’d probably gotten a 34.  My guess yesterday was a 13/10/11.  I have no idea how accurate that is.  Hopefully I was correct on a couple of the questions that I wasn’t absolutely sure on and will wind up doing better than I think.  Hopefully, I don’t score worse than that.  It’s hard to know – there were several questions that I felt were worded so ambiguously that they had two correct answers.  Anyway, I have no desire to spend the next 30 days freaking out about the exam.

The most hilarious part of my day yesterday was looking at the exam thread on SDN yesterday.  Listening to all the frantic premeds freaking out about how incredibly rough the physics and biology sections were was rather humorous.

Sometime in the next couple of days, I’ll write up what my thoughts on studying for the MCAT are, what I’d have done differently, what I found that helped me the most.  Anyway, I’m glad to be done with the exam, but I don’t feel relieved or any sense of success or accomplishment.  Hopefully, once I get my scores back, that will pass and I can check a >35 on the MCAT off my to-do list for this year.

AAMC Full-Length #11 – Last Practice Exam

Took the last practice exam last night:

Physical Sciences: 11
Verbal Reasoning: 10
Biological Sciences: 12
Comprehensive: 33

I do all of my practice exams at the office since it’s air conditioned, quiet, and there are no distractions.  That’s never been a problem until yesterday.  I had just finished reading the first passage and was getting started when my boss and some other people showed up.  I work for a really cool guy and he knows about my intent to go to medical school, so I didn’t feel like I had to hide or anything like that.  It still distracted me quite a bit and I paused the exam for a couple of hours and did some work-related stuff until he and the others left.  When I got started again, I had a hard time getting my timing down, which is weird because timing has never been an issue at all.  I wound up not finishing the physical section on time and making several calculation errors, none of which had happened before.  When I finished up with that section, I knew I probably hadn’t done well.  All things considered, scoring an 11 isn’t ‘tanking’ the section, but it’s still not what I want to see.  The physics section has been my best section by far.

One of the challenges I’ve noticed is that, after doing so well on the PS section until now, I feel like I have to double and triple check every answer.  There were a couple of sections on the exam that tested things I’m not too familiar with and I really let that get me sidetracked.  I spent at least 5 minutes trying to figure out a problem on stress and strain.  That’s a big mistake – on the real exam, if I get stuck like that, I need to make my best guess, mark it, and then come back to it at the end.  That’s much wiser than burning a bunch of time trying to answer a question on an unfamiliar topic.

Ultimately, I’m not going to let a bad performance (33 is bad?) get me discouraged or anything like that.  I’m going to review that exam this afternoon, work some problems on the topics this exam stumped me on, and then call it a night.  It’s hard to just let it go and I still feel like I could have studied harder or better, but it’s too late to do anything about it.  I’ve scored at and above my target score, I’ve freaked out on some sections and learned how to relax, and I know that if I do my best, I’m going to be fine and will be pleased with my results.  Now, just need to tie up a couple of loose ends and relax.

In other news, the lady is coming over this evening – I’m introducing her to the Alien franchise.  Chestburster is going to freak her out something fierce.