December Mini Update!

December Community Service Hours: 7

Semester Community Service Hours: 17

We are officially in our last days! Fall Pharmacology days that is! I can't believe it's almost over. For December's community service, I completed three service opportunities: Adopt a Senior Holiday Edition, Operation Value Our Vets, and The Angel Card Project. 

Adopt a Senior and Operation Value Our Vets were two opportunities sponsored through Ochsner Serves, a volunteer organization for Ochsner employees looking to serve their local communities. For Adopt a Senior, we partnered with Home Instead to buy and wrap gifts for a senior at three local retirement communities: Audubon Retirement Village, Terraces in Tulane, and Ferncrest. Due to current restrictions, I was unable to deliver the gifts personally to each senior, which I was hoping we would get to do because that's my favorite part of volunteer activities like this. However, the volunteer coordination team is collecting all the donated gifts and plans to deliver to each retirement community and express the love and well wishes of the volunteers. The Operation Value Our Vets activity was similar in that we collected items such as socks, blankets, slippers, books, etc., and donated them to Vet Force1, the sponsor of the collection drive for VA hospital patients. We were encouraged to collect holiday items to increase the spirit of the recipients. 

The activity that took the most time, but felt the most rewarding was volunteering for The Angel Card Project. The Angel Card Project is a service that recruits thousands of volunteers each year to send holiday cards to people (submitted via a form online) that are requesting love and well wishes. The purpose of the cards is to send love and cheerfulness to those that receive them. Many of the recipients expressed being sick, recently losing a spouse, battling cancer, etc. This year's list of card recipients consisted of over 1,000 people! It was hard to choose who I would mail cards to, so I used a random number generator and got 25 random numbers (each assigned to a recipient) that would dictate who my cards would be going to. I then read each of their requests as to why they would like cards, and then made cards each with a handwritten message and a 3D sticker inside. This took way longer than I expected, but felt SO REWARDING to know that something as simple as a holiday card from a "Card Angel" would bring joy and warmth to so many!

As for school, our last exam for the fall is coming this Monday and I AM NERVOUS. In this module, we've covered GI and neoplasia, and I can say that the neoplasia lectures seemed to be my favorite. So often, we hear about cancer as if it is an automatic death sentence, but learning about its mechanisms and forms of treatment/prevention has at least made the idea of cancer less intimidating to face. This has been the case for many of the topics covered in our module lectures (the gout lecture was my FAVORITE), which is what makes me love and appreciate this program a ton!

It has been a challenging, but wonderful semester. I have learned so much about myself and my ability to do well in school and it has me feeling BEYOND motivated. I've been able to explore my strengths and weaknesses when it comes to school, especially studying. This program has provided the space for so much emotional and intelligent growth. I am super excited (and slightly anxious) to see what the spring semester holds!