Medical school orientation week: Overnight retreat in the mountains

We left early Tuesday morning in a caravan of coach buses to Winter Park, a mountain retreat where the next two days of orientation week were held. If the first day of orientation week felt like college, this was a full regression to the days of Summer camp, complete with horrible cafeteria food, nature hikes, and zip lining.

The purpose of this retreat was primarily group building. Our class of 160 was divided into 20 groups of 8, and in these groups we had to complete team building tasks:

1) While everyone is blindfolded, form a right triangle out of a piece of rope. It's harder than one might think!
2) Variations on a game where we have to keep a ball up in the air as long as possible.
3) "Chocolate Acid River." This was actually the most fun of them all. Two lines served as the banks of a river, and we had to safely get our group to the other side. Squares of carpet served as safe stepping stones, which we could move, but we only had 7 of them for our group of 8.
4) We put together a group art project that represented what we saw as the future of medicine and our medical careers. We came up with a giant dream catcher made out of rope and a hula hoop, representing the interconnectedness of everyone in the health professions and how we must all work together as a team (buzz word!) to fulfill the needs of society. It also represented how the personal career goals of everyone in the group were quite divergent (rural practice, focus on underserved communities, clinical research, etc...), yet as future doctors, we will all serve our role in serving society. It was a very touchy-feely exercise.

As cheesy as these activities were, I did have a lot of fun with them, and they actually served an important purpose. It turns out that the people who I got to know so well through these team building exercises are my problem based learning (PBL) group. In addition to lecture, the curriculum also includes a strong component of small group sessions that are, as you might guess from the name, problem-based. So, for instance, in our first "practice" PBL session on Thursday, we were presented with a scenario in which we witnessed a motorcycle accident and tasked to explore all medically related facets of the scenario. In contrast to lectures, these small group sessions are mandatory. Mandatory or not, I am looking forward to these small group sessions. I do better when the material I am learning is put into context.

We were broken up into different small groups, alphabetical by last name, to talk about the honor code. I will come to know the people in this group very well over the next nine weeks, as they will be my anatomy dissection group. Like in the PBL groups, there are 8 of us, but only 4 people will be working on the cadaver at one time. On any given day, 3 people will share the dissection duties while the fourth is responsible for reading the instructions and guiding the group. Then, the two groups of 4 switch turns.

My parents and little sister were waiting for me in Aurora when I returned from the retreat. I was exhausted.