Chemistry at Johns Hopkins, Chemistry with Baltimore and My Colleagues

I am writing you all during the free weekend between Inorganic Chemistry 1 and 2, and it has been a glorious weekend. It has also been a time of reflection and gratitude, and I would like to share with you all what the past 5 weeks of my new life in Baltimore have been like.

To begin, I must say that Baltimore as a city is much better than I imagined it to be. When I told people in Portland that I was moving to Baltimore, the universal response was one of concern. "Oh," people would tell me with a sort of disheartened tone to their syllable. I knew it was crime-ridden, impoverished, and the ugly stepsister of DC, but I knew little else. The reality, therefore, has been so pleasantly surprising for me. For one, I got very lucky in the location of my housing. Living just north of the Johns Hopkins Homewood Campus, I fortuitously and unwittingly chose to live in a neighborhood that is extremely wealthy. The streets are quiet and safe, and the houses are stunningly beautiful. I have seen some of the largest mansions of my life that I just find gorgeous in their stateliness.

This Tudor-style house always makes my mouth water.
Though the picture doesn't do it justice, it is enormous!

 

Many houses in Baltimore look like this--made of
brick, with beautiful exterior shutters on their many
windows and white trim to top it all off.

 

Baltimore as a city is also much cooler and quirkier than I imagined. Two days ago, for example, I participated in "Biker Party," which is a city-wide event in which hundreds of Baltimoreans ride their bike all around the city on a designated path with a theme for each time that the party occurs. The theme is last Friday was the 80's, so you can imagine the Madonna and David Bowie look-alikes. It was a hilarious event and a total blast. I've also participated in Honfest, Baltimore's yearly street festival. The word "hon" is apparently special to Baltimore because of how much the locals use it when addressing other people. (It's already happened to me, and it is quite endearing, if I do say so myself!) Honfest was a big street event with lots of local vendors, live music, costume-wearing, and fraternizing. I went with some people in my program and thoroughly enjoyed the people-watching and the sampling of the food.

Crabcakes are a special here given Baltimore's proximity
to the Chesapeake Bay.

The people in my program are truly incredible, and even after 5 weeks, I already know that I have made friends that will stay a part of my life for as long as I'm given to live on this earth. We all share so much in common, yet we are all so different. Our commonalities are that we all studied something unrelated to medicine, yet we have all decided that becoming a physician is what we want to do with our lives. None of us were certain that this was the path for us when we were 16, yet all of us now desire this dream deeply and can articulate our attraction to the medical field in neat, diverse ways. Some of my closest friends in the program so far include Tim, a hilarious guy with a background in art that reminds me a lot of my best friend in high school Shelby; Dave, the most organized, spreadsheet-making, and ambitious person I've met since Dad; Chris, a former English major from Harvard with a wicked wit and a panoply of interests; Joey, a New Yorker interested in environmental conservation; and Anna, a woman with a masters in French literature. These people are driven, mature, and fun-as-all-get-out. It's been one heck of a ride with them all. Perhaps because of how intense our program is and how much it demands of us, we've all bonded very quickly and very well, relying on each other for morale, support, and friendship. I have few pictures of these folks yet, but I will begin to post more as I collect them.

Lastly, I want to tell you all about the program itself. All that I can say is that Johns Hopkins students don't get to tack that pretty name to their resume for nothin'. The academic coursework here is unlike anything I have experienced elsewhere, including Professor Kearl's economics course at BYU and Dr. Hind's intense upper-level Spanish literature classes. Part of what was so difficult about the semester was that it was condensed and that we took it concurrently with chemistry lab. The material itself was rarely exceedingly difficult, but what was so hard was trying to find enough time to do the hours of effective studying necessary to get the concepts to sink into your brain between all of the pre- and post-lab quizzes and write-ups, the homework for the lecture class, and the weekly tests (the average rate of tests, given that we had 2 lab tests and 3 lecture tests over the course of 5 weeks). The pace was dizzying, and it became impossible at points to do everything. It was very stressful at moments, and it was super humbling. Nevertheless, I survived, and I know a lot more chemistry on this end than I did coming in. I learned some fascinating things about the chemical make-up of our world. I learned about the special properties of the intermolecular attractive force called "hydrogen bonding" that makes solid water (a more dense phase of the compound) lighter than liquid water and that permits life to exist. I learned what entropy and enthalpy are and how to calculate them in myriad situations. I learned how to diagram molecules with Lewis dot structures and how to predict their molecular geometries using the Valence Shell Electron Pair Repulsion theory. It was kind of amazing, even if massively stressful. The best thing about those stressful weeks was knowing that all of this material really matters and will become relevant as my medical education continues. This class was not just a hoop to jump through or a grade to earn. It was about absorbing material that will inform the rest of my education and enhance my ability to care for my patients one day, and that was a powerful feeling.

I'm off to go enjoy the rest of my Sunday before summer term 2 begins tomorrow! Wish me luck, and know that I think of all of you all the time.