Headline Stories
Class of 2008 Orientation
Laurel Vuongie M'08After years of all those pre-med classes, surviving 8 hours of the MCATS, shelling out big bucks for the applications, and sitting through med school interviews ("So, what is the meaning of life?"), the 169 members of the TUSM Class of 2008 finally arrived on August 23, 2004. We kicked off orientation week bright-eyed, dressed-to-impress, and ready to meet as many classmates as possible. We ended the week ready for another vacation, but familiar with every bar in Boston, getting punk'd and meeting some of the best med students in the city.
Class of 2008 Orientation Photo Album
Photography: Jane Rosen M'07 and David Lo M'07view pictures...
Tufts President Takes the Physical Challenge
Trevor B. Emory M'07The gun goes off spreading eddies of smoke into the crisp April morning air. Your heart is pounding and your head is light as your feet start to propel you almost effortlessly through the expansive sea of runners washing down the road ahead of you. You are carried along in a riptide of excitement that seems to consume everything and everyone in its path. As you realize what is happening, your lungs begin to burn and your muscles ache, but you are enthralled by the ethereal haze that envelops every fiber of your being, amplified by the echo of fans who line the streets 10 rows deep. You are whisked along with the group, comprising another segment of the huge caterpillar of runners wiggling through the countryside. As you near your ultimate destination 26.2 miles from where you began, screams of encouragement gel into an amorphous cacophony that erupts from the ever-thickening crowds along the course. The once friendly course has now transmogrified into a monstrous landscape inundated with hills that send searing pain through your quadriceps as you methodically pound your way up them. Rounding the final turn onto Boylston Street, you feel as though you cannot go on even though the elusive end is now in sight. With a final burst of energy you though had long since abandoned you, you breach the finish line with defiant tenacity. You have done it! What seemed like an unobtainable goal has become reality.
my summer selective in Madison, WI
Ryan Morrissey M'071. The most important things I learned while shadowing at UW hospital: Different services do not get along. Personal grudges and the old cliché of medicine versus surgery are nothing compared to the incomplete healthcare fostered by the clashes of various healthcare teams, the result of our current system. Cardiologists, although they work well with "renal" and enjoy the opinions of CT surgeons, do not always have the most flattering things to say about radiology, who is slow to come to the ICU or ophthalmology (with TWO h's), because their runic scribble is impossible to decipher: "I think those green pencil lines across that red, yellow circle are…not good." ID docs and pathology do not work at the pace that would be appreciated by heart docs, perhaps because heart failure consults are not their primary patients, i.e. concern or perhaps it's just imagined and they are just really busy. And of course, my favorite, ER docs can't do a proper work-up for heart failure patients, and wake-up calls from residents in the ER are incoherent ramblings: did you or did you not even see the patient?