First Days

The first day was a long day even though I only had one class to attend. This was made worse by my need to get some extra sleep. I felt like a chicken with my head cut off all day, a little lost and confused everywhere I went. I made it though, one class and first day of volunteering down. I don't have any really good stories from this, but I want to get it out so I can move on.

This class is going to be interesting...Biology. Yes I despised it in high school and I doubt it is going to be a lot better in college, but things are inherently going to be more interesting because now I have application to the topics. I have Dr. R as a professor; that is Dr. or Professor R, not Mrs. R. Okay, thank you for the lesson in respect can we please move on to learning now. We spent the whole class period talking about how the class is going to be hard and how they want us to think on a higher level than just memorizing facts. I am cool with that, I can do both and I am glad to understand that her tests are going to be little fact memorization and more application. We have assigned seats, which is way weird for me but I can roll with it. I don’t' really care who I sit by, I am there to take notes and learn, I am not going to be a social butterfly in lecture. What sucks though is that I have already run off the people on either side of me. I have that effect on people. The girl to my left decided to drop the class and the person to my right never showed up. Oh well, now I don’t have to worry about bumping elbows when trying to use the arm rest, because that is just awkward. Also, we were put into teams and given team names. Teams will be used to do assignments together for lecture. My team name is baboon...I kid you not. That is all I really have on the first class, I am ready to get started learning. Next week I have the full week of biology, lecture and lab on Tuesday and lecture on Thursday.

I also had my first day as a volunteer in the ER on Thursday. I changed into my black pants and pink smock and headed to the emergency room to try and find my contact there, Debbie. They sent me back and Debbie showed me around and told me what all I could do. I signed in and started work, which was more standing around than anything. As a volunteer, I can clean rooms and beds after the patients are discharged, stock the linens in the rooms, transport patients once they are discharged, and I can greet the patients and see if there is anything I can get for them to make them more comfortable. I spent a lot of time talking with the nurses and ER techs and cleaning rooms when they became available. It was a slow night, nothing interesting to report. It made me excited about working in the ER in the future, even though there was not much going on while I was there. I plan to volunteer about 4 hours a week on Thursdays after class, but they are really flexible about my schedule, so I can pretty much come in whenever I have time and help out. I like that, at first I thought it was going to be really regimented, but they are just glad to have some extra help