I got a lot of good advice while I was a post-bacc student. Some of it took a while to settle in, either because I needed to overcome some initial resistance in order to see its truth, or because I couldn’t grasp what had been offered without hindsight to help me. Some if it hit me immediately and changed how I saw things. An example of the latter is something my friend Erin said to me one day over coffee. I’d just wrapped…

I still remember my first semester of Orgo as a post-bacc student, when my friend Erin sat with me in the library and did her best to explain the concept of chirality. She stretched her palms in front of me and asked me to imagine a mirror plane between them: right and left were mirror images of each other. She folded her palms together to bring the point home. “But no matter what,” she said, “I can’t stack my right palm on top…

My current DI placement is at a nursing home that offers both long- and short-term care. I’m learning a lot about what and how people eat when they’re recovering from surgeries or in the process of rehabilitation. And I’m gaining a better understanding of food choices and habits toward the end of life. Not surprisingly, much of what people ask for are simple, familiar, and comforting foods. This echoes an insight that struck me when I read Being Mortal a year or so…

“When you don’t know what to do or how to move forward, stand still.” This is a piece of advice that my mother gave me during my post-bacc years. That time in my life was marked by a lot of indecision and agonized choices–most often, the choice of whether or not to keep going with my program for another semester or not. I’d receive yet another poor score or a discouraging comment or simply be hit with a spell of burnout, and I’d doubt what…