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Author: The Grey Literature
This is the personal blog of Benjamin Gregory Carlisle PhD.
Queer; Academic; Queer academic.
"I'm the research fairy, here to make your academic problems disappear!"
Periodically, Canada Revenue likes to send me confusing letters. I think they do it just to mess with me. This weekend, I got a letter from them, indicating that I owed money … or maybe it was indicating that I didn’t owe money. The letter wasn’t very clear. This morning, I phoned Canada Revenue (despite being given the wrong number in the letter) and figured it all out. It turns out that the letter was sent for no reason at all. They already had the information that they were requesting, and no balance was owing. In fact, the whole issue was resolved months ago, but for some reason, it took a long time for the letter to reach me. At the end of the conversation, the agent told me that I could have put the letter in my shredder without opening it and there would have been no repercussions. If only I could do that with everything Revenue Canada sends me!
OSAP has been dragging its feet, and sending me terrible, contradictory messages for weeks now, which have made me worry about whether or not I’ll have money for school. I finally got in touch with people from the McGill Financial Aid office and they told me that OSAP has figured out what to do with me after all, and that my OSAP might be in as early as Thursday of this week!
My computer monitor has gone and died on me, but it’s under warranty. Today, I took it to the UPS store (as much as I hate UPS) and had it delivered back to the company that made it, to be fixed or replaced.
I renewed my Québec driver’s licence, and went in to have my photo taken for the new one.
I did three chapters of organic chemistry, and also reviewed two chapters of biology. I finished biology three weeks ago, but I’m going over it again, so I don’t forget.
I had a minor accident a few weeks back, where I suffered a blow to the head. I didn’t think it was too bad, so I didn’t end up going to the hospital for it right away.
I didn’t plan on going to the hospital at all, actually. I had a great black eye, and I just told everyone that I got into a big fight.
Come to think of it, “I didn’t think it was very serious, so I didn’t go to the doctor” is a theme that recurs in my medical history a lot.
It wasn’t until my eye got infected that I went to the hospital. I went in, told the ER doctor my symptoms:
She took my temperature, blood pressure and heart rate.
“You have a fever, Mr. Carlisle,” she told me, struggling with my last name (French Canadians have a hard time figuring out the silent S), “When you blow your nose, does the phlegm have any colour?”
“Yes, in fact. It’s black.”
“Black?” she asked, surprised.
You know that you have something good when your symptoms shock the ER doctor. I blew my nose and proved it to her.
I sat in the waiting room until another doctor came to see me, and pronounced that I had pink eye, and was about to send me on my way when I asked if the pink eye would explain the fever that I had.
“Fever?” she asked. That’s two ER doctors that I shocked.
She started feeling around my skull at that point, seeing where it hurt and didn’t, and decided to send me for a CT scan. I dripped my pink-eye tears all over the CT machine. I’m sure that the next 5 patients to use it will get infected, thanks to me.
When the results came back, she told me that I had broken my right orbital floor, and the tissues surrounding my eye were actually falling down into my sinus. That would explain the fever, sore throat, and the blood in my phlegm. There wasn’t any bone supporting my right eye, so it was literally falling through my face. I would need surgery.
I was sent to see an ophthalmologist, who told me that my right eye had fallen about 3mm from where it should be. On the upside though, he told me that I still have 20/20 vision, and that there’s no nerve damage or damage to my retina. The only problem is the broken bone and the pink eye.
I was sent to see the surgeons who were going to fix my face, and they sent me home for a week and a half, to let the infection go away, so that they don’t let it get inside my skull. On Friday, August 6th, I had my surgery, and despite my specific instructions that they replace my right eye with a Borg-style implant, they only put a metal plate in my skull, to fix the bone, and put my eye right back where it should be. I will make a full recovery and require no bionic implants at all.
The swelling has gone down almost entirely, and I’m feeling good. I think they must have made the incision into my head somewhere inside my eyelid, so there won’t even be a scar.
There were only two really scary parts about this whole thing:
1. When I am put on morphine, I have hallucinations. Not really bad ones, but I consistently have them. This time, I seriously believed that if I stopped consciously thinking about my breathing, then I would stop breathing, and probably die. I was very afraid to go to sleep.
2. When I mentioned to the doctors that I’m a MA bioethics student at McGill, they had a sort of “we better be on our best behaviour now” thing going on, which scared me. What do they think they can normally get away with, that they can’t with a bioethicist watching?
I asked Pickles, and she says, “They are both unimaginable evils.”
Four points to whoever makes the most persuasive argument. If you can also give a feasible plan for escaping a bicyclic velociraptor or automotive bear, you will also have the satisfaction of probably having saved us all.
As an MA student in bioethics, I am very interested in the advertisements on the Métro for participation in phase I drug studies.
And that’s not just because they were very tempting back when I had no job and no prospects at the end of the school year in April.
I have found the evolution of this particular advertisement to be very notable indeed. A few months ago, when I first noticed it, it went something like this:
“Up to $4000 for healthy men, 18–45 / A clinical trial? Why not!”
It would run in English first, then in French, and in the version that they were running a few months ago, there was no translation problem.
Now, it is the same message, except instead of “A clinical trial? Why not!” it says, “Why not volunteers [sic]?”
English mistranslation aside, the emphasis of the message has changed. At first, the tone was more on the “Why not?”—it was more like the advertisers were saying, “Yeah, we know it’s a clinical trial, but let’s throw caution to the wind! What could go wrong?”
Now, the emphasis has changed. It’s like the advertisers are now trying to go for more of the “It’s for a good cause” feel. “Volunteer. Why wouldn’t you? It’s so that these kind people can develop drugs that will help all of us.”
Yesterday, I finished all 16 chapters of the Kaplan MCAT biology review volume. My favourite part of the book is the bit of the cover where it guarantees a higher score. And then there’s an asterisk. Follow the asterisk down, and it says, “Or your money back. Conditions apply. See inside for details.”
I looked through the book a couple times, just out of curiosity, but I could find no reference to these conditions or details. Oh well.
Today, I will go through a couple of the practice exams on this section of the material, and go to the Financial Aid office at McGill to drop off the last of the OSAP forms.
This is going to be the first time in a long time that I went downtown. I’ll bring my camera, in case something unexpected happens.
Rainy days are perfect for studying. I don’t want to leave my apartment at all.
I’ve had a relatively productive day. I’ve cleaned up a bit, studied some genetics, moved one step closer to getting my OSAP loan, and I assembled all the documents I need to make sure that my OHIP health insurance doesn’t expire this September. Once it stops raining, I’ll go outside and put them all in the post.
You’ll notice that I’ve done a bit of a refresh on the blog. I’m still not 100% fussed on the colour scheme, but I wanted to go live anyway. The old theme was very dark, and hard-to-read, and I think this one is better by those criteria anyway. :)
Update: I just got an invoice for tuition for this year. :| School is expensive. I hope that OSAP is generous to me this year! I also changed the colour scheme on this theme a bit. I got rid of the blue highlights. It’s got a kind of “coffee” thing going on now. I think I’ll leave it like this for a while and see how I like it in a few days.
Things that the XKCD comic says will be on a typical university’s front page:
Campus photo slideshow … ✓
Alumni … ✓
Events … ✓
Press releases … ✓
School’s philosophy … sort of, if you count the summary in the footer
Letter from the president … ✓
Virtual tour … no
Full name of the school … ✓
Things that the XKCD comic says that people will be looking for on a typical university’s website:
Faculty contacts … no
Campus address … ✓
Application forms … there’s a link to a page about it (half points)
Academic calendar … I have no idea where to find one of those for McGill, and I’ve been a student there for over a year. I’m serious about this. I have no idea how to find out when Reading Week is, officially. Last year, I found out by looking on the McGill Student Union’s site for the week in February when it wasn’t offering any programmes or services.
Campus police phone number …no
Department/course lists … no
Parking information … no
Usable campus map … such a thing does not exist at McGill. And yes, I’m aware of this map – it is unusable. Try to find the Bioethics Unit on there without cheating.
Looks like the XKCD cartoon gives a pretty much accurate assessment of McGill’s front page.
If we compare this to the front page of UWO, my alma mater, UWO does slightly better, but not because they have anything more useful on their site. They just don’t have the campus slideshow or letter from the president.
I’m tempted to email this comic to McGill Communications Services, but I don’t want to be a jerk.
While studying from the privately-produced MCAT study guides that I bought, I’ve noticed some differences between the way material is presented in the study guides as opposed to most academic material that I’ve consumed over the years.
I suppose that the Kaplan study guides are the product of different sorts of pressures than the textbooks and course notes produced by academia, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Academia is designed to produce freedom of thought and allow discourse at the highest level. It is supposed to be a no-holds-barred intellectual brawl. That’s why universities have the institution of tenure. It’s so that professors can pursue their research along whatever lines it takes them, without worrying that they’ll lose their job if they discover something that their employer doesn’t like. (This is a massive idealization and simplification of course.)
The Kaplan study guides, on the other hand, were designed for one purpose: to make profit for Kaplan’s shareholders. The Kaplan company thinks it can make money by producing MCAT prep materials and services and selling them. The pressure for the Kaplan guides to be good is so that they don’t get sued for publishing misleading MCAT guides, and so that they have customers with good experiences, who will recommend Kaplan study guides and prep courses to others.
Both academia and the commercial preparatory systems are set up such that they (generally) produce good curriculum, but I’ve noticed some differences between the two, which I think demonstrate some characteristic features of each one.
For example, the Kaplan study guides are written with mnemonics in the margins, silly analogies that are intentionally carried too far so as to be memorable, and the guide’s text is written with humour.
Academics are often guilty of making the material difficult to learn, or at the least, there isn’t nearly the same emphasis on trying to help the student pass the test.
The Kaplan guides are written engagingly, even soothingly. They are specifically trying not to scare you with the amount of material you need to know.
I had a physiology prof who stood at the front of the lecture theatre, held up the course package on the first day of the course, and actually did try to scare us with the sheer size of the volume.
I don’t think I’d go so far as to say that the Kaplan guides are entertaining, but they are certainly better to read than that physiology course package was.
The Kaplan guides have each of the articles rated out of six stars. The higher the number of stars, the more frequently it is examined on the MCAT, and the easier it is to learn. So a one-star concept would be one that is tested very infrequently, and that is difficult to master. This is to help students focus on the pieces of information that will best help them score well on the exam.
I have had courses (and textbooks) where the most insignificant detail is dwelt upon ad nauseum, because it is the professor’s favourite subject. This sort of thinking is encouraged in the academic world, since new developments in science and philosophy often come about because of attention to the details of seemingly insignificant problems.
Such ways of thinking do not help students pass exams, though, so the Kaplan guides are very focussed.
In some ways, academia could learn something from the focus that the corporate world brings to their prep materials. I mean, really, who in their right mind (except an academic philosopher) would recommend studying the works of Immanuel Kant in an attempt to learn the discipline of rigourous thought?
I have been studying for the MCAT using a set of books from Kaplan, an MCAT prep company, and I’ve realised a few things.
First off, medicine admissions is big business. I’m not even talking about medicine. I just mean the admissions process. Imagine you just wanted to apply to all the medical schools in Ontario, for example. First you would have to write the MCAT. This will cost you $230. Then, you will need to pay for the application, and to apply to every school in Ontario through OMSAS, it will cost about $660.
That’s $890 just to apply and take the MCAT.
Now imagine that you want to take a prep course for the MCAT. I went shopping around for MCAT prep, and someone from Kaplan tried to sell me a comprehensive package which included one-on-one tutoring, online lectures, books, and practice exams. All told, the tutor would have been making roughly $180 per hour from me, and the package would cost me $2799.
There is a whole industry built up around the fact that there’s huge competition to get into medical school. I ended up spending $150 for review books and practice exams, myself.
I can understand companies like Prep 101 and Kaplan charging huge sums for their expertise and time. They are, after all, in the business of making money, and people (generally) are willing to spend money on investments that they think will bring a greater return in the long run. I have no problem with them.
That said, there’s no way they are getting $2700 from me! I don’t care how good their tutor is. There’s no way he’s worth $180 an hour. Imagine knowing that your MCAT tutor is coming, and that you’re paying that much for him. I imagine I would spend as much time prepping for my meeting with the tutor as I would spend prepping for the MCAT, so that I would be sure to get my money’s worth, and that sort of mentality might not actually best help one to prepare for the MCAT.
Anyway, I was thinking, and of course, I can understand wanting policies that make it difficult for someone to get into medical school. You don’t want an unqualified person committing surgery against a patient, after all. So you would want to produce a high intellectual barrier, or a high skill barrier, or otherwise make it difficult, but in ways that elminate the greatest number of people that should not be doctors.
What’s confusing though, is why medical academia would have policies that produce such a high financial barrier to entry. The $890 is what you would pay if you were going for a bargain-basement medical school admission. That’s the minimum you would have to pay. You’re not buying any extra review material on that budget. You’re not getting any practice exams, tutoring or classes. That’s just what it costs to apply, and nothing more.
Maybe it’s to weed out those who might just apply on a whim. Or maybe doctors don’t want new applicants to be spared any hardship they themselves had to suffer. Maybe it actually does cost that much to ensure that the process is fair. I’m not sure what the real reason is.
I arrived here in Montreal one year ago on Friday.
A lot has changed.
Sometimes it’s good to sit back and take stock of all the things that have happened, and to think about all the things that one has to be thankful for. Things are generally pretty good now: I had a great job for the summer, I have great friends living in my building, and I was just talking with Pickles today and thinking about how much I appreciate her. I even have a TA-ship and an RA-ship lined up for this school year.
I’m TA-ing the introductory ethics course in the philosophy department this year, which will be exciting.
Things are different from the way they were a year ago. They’re different from what I expected, and certainly different from what I wanted, but I’m okay with the way things are.
