October Blog

October Service Hours: 2 hours

Cumulative for the Fall semester: 2 hour

October has been a learning but rewarding time in the program. The first volunteering activity I did was with ACEing Autism in which I played tennis with children in the autism spectrum. I was a behavior technician in undergrad and I wanted to continue to work with children with autism so I had searched up organizations near me. When I arrived I was essentially assigned a child to stay with and I played tennis with her, it was truly fun and I am going to continue doing this. I already feel I have learned how to be patient and empathetic because of my prior experience but even with this experience I learn the same skills. My second volunteering was with Tulane Brain Institute at the Junior Achievement of New Orleans. In this volunteering event, I sat in a panel with other people in the health sciences field and just explained my aspirations, my struggles and essentially my journey to high schoolers with health sciences aspirations. Additionally, I overlooked stations of human brain samples, microscope with brain slices, and illusion activities. I wanted to do this because I deemed it was important to help people with similar aspirations on how to navigate this journey but also how to overcome the struggles and push through your mistakes.  Also I believed the neuroscience field is interesting and I love to teach people about it. I haven't done a activity like this so I feel as I learned a little bit on how to connect with high schoolers and try to teach them something they aren't familiar with but also make it fun. 

These past few weeks I feel as if it's been the most transformative as my understanding and knowledge of pharmacology has been greatly enhanced. The autonomic nervous system and cardiovascular modules definitely gave me the most knowledge as compared to other units. I did enjoy how in the ANS module everything I learned I can connect to the CV module. So with my knowledge of how the SNS operates and PNS I can know what drugs to use at the CV module. I feel as if my understanding of therapeutics and how to think about what drugs to administer a patient has improved. I can understand symptoms and know what system is impacted and how to know what drug is needed. Especially, the heart attack stimulation was informative on how to think of these questions. The only area I still feel like I need to spend more time is Molecular Pharmacology, I feel like I need to spend more time on it as those concepts don't come easy to me. However, overall I'm happy with my performance.