where's waldo?

a week from tomorrow i'll move back to des moines, where i'll live for 4 weeks with a friend while i'm doing my psychiatry rotation. i'll be working with a pediatric psychiatrist, which i am both excited and nervous about. but mostly excited.

here's my schedule, as it now stands, for my 3rd year of medical school:
sept: psych, des moines
oct: peds, kansas city
nov: peds, des moines
dec: obgyn, chicago
jan: endocrine, detroit
feb: anesthesia, detroit
march: family practice, quad cities, iowa
april: family practice, quad cities, iowa
may-august: hospital block (which includes four weeks each of surgery, ER, internal medicine, and either cardiology or ICU), quad cities, iowa

it will be a lot of moving, but it's broken up nicely, and should work out ok.

my only other concern, is that i've heard advice that you shouldn't rotate in what you want to do end up doing right away... but this is how my schedule worked out. and so, this future pediatrician will see only kids for the 1st three months of my rotations. i'm sure that things will work out fine in the end. but i will admit to being slightly nervous about something coming back to haunt me... like hospitals that i might want to do residency at remembering me as a babbling idiot of a 3rd yr when i rotated there way back in the first block of rotations... i'll just know in my head that i have to work hard right off the bat to make good impressions on important people.

medicine, like so many other things, is more about who you know than what you know. even more than that though, it's about who you know and how much they like you. so i'll do my best to play the game: be likeable, don't ruffle too many feathers, and bring treats.