Let us try this again…

I started a blog several years ago in an attempt to detail a year at Oxford University as a visiting American student.  I am returning to this endeavor because a friend politely told me that posting one blog and then allowing several years to go by without another is boring and futile.  Let’s try this again. 

This time around, I hope to give some insight into life as a post baccalaureate pre-medical student at Columbia University in New York.  This program is unique to the pre-medical studies.  There are perhaps less than a hundred of these programs in the United States, none in the west between Chicago and California with an exception in some technical school god-know-where in Texas.  The Postbacc opportunity is focused in the East Coast of the United States.  Columbia University hosts the oldest program, with some 50 years of experience and accepts the largest body of Postbacc students.  I came to Columbia for the reasons that there were not programs open to me as a student in Colorado, the prestige of the program, and most importantly–Columbia has long been in my dreams as a place to study and live.  That is to say, I thought I would follow some of my hero’s to the university (The Beat writers, Hunter S. Thompson) and find the same inspiration, challenges, and groups of people that could propel me to new and exciting heights of experience and learning. 

This blog project was conceived when I first came to Columbia, but the first semester offered so many distractions and stress that it is only now that I hope to put some serious effort into the project.  I will return to issues that I should have addressed in the first semester as I think of them.  Most of all, I want this project to be a collage of experience, not just from me but hopefully from others as well.  I will try my best to address the issues and experiences I face that seem to be unique to this experience.  It is my hope that this writing will help other people in their decisions to go back to school, stay in college several more years, or simply decide if the Postbacc program is something they want to pursue. While I researched Postbacc programs, there was no such information, except from the programs themselves, and it is well accepted that this information is glossy, refined, sterilized and little help with considering a completely different lifestyle change.   Selfishly, this blog is going to be a way for me to revisit my past life as a student of English Lit and Philosophy.  The task and practice of writing–creatively or otherwise– is something that I enjoy but has little relevance to studying the undergraduate sciences.  I will try to strike balances between what seems my past life, my passions, and the tasks which will take me one step further in the direction I am heading. 

I haven’t arrived yet, but I am gonna go… One step Further

-D