Free advice

This is worth its weight in gold. At $135 it prints at around 2c a page, 1200dpi. That makes it cheaper and better than the uni printers who charge around 14c per page.

A word of warning

To anyone planning on starting a graduate entry masters in speech pathology at UQ.

You will need to make sure you have or can get the following things.

- A dictaphone, preferrably digital, with digital output to a computer if you know what you're doing.

- A work uniform, smart casual, for clinical placements.

- The course text

- Lots (I mean a lot) of photocopy credit.

These things will make your life easier if you have them before the program starts.

In addition once it begins make sure your blue card application is away ASAP or you'll have trouble finding kids to observe. Make sure you get an early start on finding an old person (65+-) to interview as they're really tricky to find, and no, I don't know what you're meant to be doing for assessment either.

I wish I was still doing anatomy, at least I knew what they wanted accomplished for assessment.

Back to work

Parents of Australia, did you know that funding to assist your child is allocated not based on the global assessment of a competent practicioner but on a score on a test normed for an American population. If your kid has a serious problem but doesn't score low enough on a test compared to American children, they won't get the funding they need to help them. Cheery thought.

Anway back to the grind of uni, started SPCH7801 today which is an introduction to speech pathology, I haven't got my immunisations done yet, still have to do some painful TB thing which should be fun. I also have to find a 4 year old kid sometime next week and administer a test to them, which should be as enjoyable as herding cats, then I get to find someone over 65 to test them too and report my observations. Tempted to just google and pretend I found some model subjects but I'll probably go through with it, at least it'll be interesting.

This post is brought to you on a laptop running Linux, I'll be taking this very machine to uni from now on seeing as how our notes are in powerpoint and thus are easily editable. I've pretty much stopped using windows except to play games.

Tests and laziness

We're all ugly babies


Last week was pretty tough, the pectoral girdle, upper arm, brain muscles of the torso an cranial nerves all packed into one week. Then we get a test in which a quarter of the questions are on cranial nerves, the bit which we spent the least time on. No upper arm, barely anything on the brain, how irritating, seeing as how I barely looked at the cranial nerves and paid the price. It's a pretty intensive course so I should have known better but I just didn't have enough time. Oh well. Everyone in my group passed, which is good, I was worried that one in particular was on the verge of giving up. Sciences can be pretty tough to get used to.

We did embryonic development this Friday. It seems that Tony Abbott missed out on this one when he was in uni. If there's anyone who needs to learn the difference between a blastocyst and an embryo... It was interesting to see which bits of primordial goo and clumps of cells develop into a cute nose or funny pair of ears. I reckon they should have started the course with that topic.

The Face

We did the facial muscles last Friday, they were ridiculously difficult, it's tough to separate one group from another except for the really obvious ones like the nasalis and orbicularii (sp?) which are easy because they're round. everything else is a mishmash of strands of muscle running all over the place. It's crazy to think that you've got all these muscles in your face yet most of them serve no purpose other than communication via facial expression. Our senses of smell and hearing are so poor that it's pretty much pointless having muscles to manipulate the nose or ears yet there they are. Today we did the pectoral girdle which isn't quite so bad and the brain, which is easy for me seeing as how I've done it before (even though I've never seen an actual brain specimen before in psyc). Our lecturer for the CNS wasn't too great though. She a German lady who learned it all in German and sometimes struggles to be understood, you can actually tell she's busy translating some of the things she wants to point out from German to English.

Our practicals are a bit of a worry, we only have two desperately overworked tutors for a class of about 30-40. It just isn't enough for everyone's questions to be answered let alone demonstrations of things we need to know. It's a little annoying but not unbearable.

I have yet another contact tomorrow for speech pathology, 5 hours.

Skull and Bones

Skull and axial skeleton today, fun fun fun. Our lecturer flies through the material, obviously he knows his stuff but I think they should take into account that some of the people in the subject have never done science, let alone anatomy and that just racing through reams of nomenclature might be a bit much for them. It's pretty rough for me and I'm reasonably knowledgable about cranio-spinal anatomy... Anyway lecture then prac.

We had some more people join our group today, but I forgot their names (sorry if you ever read this) they were girls too, which isn't surprising, 9 out of 10 class members are female. It's a little strange to be so outnumbered, it's even more skewed than psych, which is saying a lot. Still I'd much rather work with pretty, clever girls than with ugly, smelly, clever men. So we messed around with the skull and spine today. So many holes and dongles on the skull, it was a total nightmare, particularly because they lec didn't divide the skull up and go through it methodically so it was really much harder than it needed to be. The spine is basically repeating units so that was much easier. Everyone kept looking at me to help explain things but I don't know that much about this stuff so I did the best I could even though I was wrong most of the time. Still it went ok. There's a test on everything so far on Fri. They get specimens, stick pins in them and ask us questions about them. 15 stations with 60 seconds to answer each one before a (very loud) beeper signals you to move on. Guess I know what I'll be doing all of tomorrow.

First Impressions

Plastination, It's cool

Started today, I biked in this morning at 9am, got to the class eventually. The lecture theatre took some finding. Anyway, I get there and it's locked so I hang around with a bunch of other people for a few mins before I try knocking on the door. The lecturer, Dr Kippers, opens it and lets us in.

Not a bad hour of anatomy (ANAT7000), went over bones and then off to the lab to muck around with human remains. That was a bit strange at first, seeing kids with arms full of bones marching back and forth but you soon get used to it, and the smell. My gloves didn't fit, large is never big enough so i'll probably have to buy some XL ones. I wound up sitting with Melinda, Cathy and Laura who were good fun to work with.

We broke (haha) for a two hour lunch so I went home to yummy sandwiches (thanks Sarah).

Got back for another 3 hours, lecture on joints, off to the lab again to poke around some plastinated body parts. They looked like old steaks. After two hours of arguing over whether an elbow is a hinge joint or not, we finished up.

Looks alright so far, I have some sort of meeting tomorrow morning but thankfully I'm done at 12. Oh and there's a test on Fri, yay, what a great holiday so far!!