Research!

Hey everyone! So I am coming to you this morning after a long night of wind, rain and storms. It doesn't rain often here, but when it does, it means business. With an apartment on the sixth floor you can really hear the wind whipping and the windows banging. I was lying in bed trying to sleep thinking, there are no tornadoes here right?? Apparently not. I made it through the night to a nice sunny morning. And by the way! I am now only 5 hours removed from Eastern Time! Daylight Saving Time ends a week early here, so right now it is 9 AM instead of 10.

As I alluded to in my previous post, some pretty exciting stuff happened this past week! Alfredo put me in touch with a professor at the University named Juan Luis and we were able to arrange a meeting for Thursday. We met and had some coffee and I explained to him my desire to get involved with some of the research projects in the Department of Preventative Medicine and Public Health. He was incredibly open and took me around the department to introduce me to some of the other staff. Apparently I'm a hot commodity as a math major (although I still must continually explain why I studied math and am now studying medicine). I met with some of the other professors and it looks like I'm going to get involved in at least one research project, which is really exciting and encouraging for me. I was starting to get frustrated with the pace at which things were moving. Coming here I had planned on doing research in some way, so it's nice to see it start to take shape! I just have to remind myself that things like this move a little slower in Spain :)

Friday morning I met with Luis, one of the professors in the department, and we talked some more about ways for me to get involved. In addition to being valuable as a math major, I am valuable as a native English speaker because a lot of the papers and articles they write are in English. Luis had some good ideas for ways I can formulate my own epidemiological investigation, perhaps comparing the statistics of a disease in the U.S. and Spain. I'm excited to get started!

Early tomorrow morning I will be leaving Spain to head back to the states for a medical school interview, so I won't be updating the blog for awhile. I will be interviewing at the Wake Forest School of Medicine and I am very excited! I'll update when I can! As always, thanks for reading! And Happy Halloween!!!