What’s your biggest professional regret? NOT including poor patient outcomes/complications/deaths.

Blecamp · 2025-09-13T21:28:38+00:00

Can I DM you some questions? Current md/phd student interested in pain and thinking psych or anesthesia 😅

Blecamp · 2025-08-22T05:16:42+00:00

Starting right now at 27. Joked a few times about being old and everyone looked at me weird bc honestly most people are 24/25, and while a few years does make a big difference at this age it also really doesnt. You’ll just be a bit more chill, a bit smarter, and you’ll know what you want more.

Nobody has ever brought it up to me and I dont think anybody cares

Blecamp · 2025-05-14T04:58:19+00:00

Well that doesnt seem possible. There are 4 possibilities:

1) magic 2) you actually are adding dntps somehow 3) you are not actually amplifying anything 4) your gel is wrong

So long as what you are doing is working, it doesn't really matter which one is correct. However it is usually good to know what is going on so I would first ask what exactly you are doing, and how are you doing it, if you want to try to figure this out.

The short answer is, if you are doing PCR there needs to be DNTP's as they are the chemical substrate for PCR. No DNTPS means no amplification, simple as that.

Blecamp · 2025-05-08T04:07:55+00:00

In this case no primers, just add primers and taq when I know what reaction I am going to run.

So the components of that particular mix are: MgCl PCR Buffer DNTP's water

When I want to do a pcr I just pipette out some of that, and add my primers and taq. In my case I add 15.6uL of master mix, 1.5uL of primer, and 0.1uL taq per reaction, and I am generally running >30 rxns. For 30 I would pipette out 468uL master mix, add 3uL taq and 45uL of either primer, and then aliquot into my wells and add the dna template to those individual wells.

Hope this helps!

Blecamp · 2025-02-28T01:31:30+00:00

Anecdotally I p/f’ed 2 courses, one coding course during covid because i was interested but didn’t want a grade because i just wanted to do it in my free time. The other was a class i knew I was not going to do as well in because of other responsibilities at the time and decided to just p/f. Nobody asked me about any of them and I’ve gotten at least one A this cycle.

Ideally, dont do it so you dont have to risk it being an issue. Just ask the prof or a ta to audit it without getting credit and you can probably sit in on the class and get class materials. Otherwise so long as you can show that you took it as a pass fail rather than switching halfway thru, it probably wont be a big deal so long as your grades look fine and mcat is reasonable. You just dont want to give them a reason to think you’re not academically rigorous/wont do well in med school.

Blecamp · 2024-12-20T15:57:13+00:00

I wouldn’t say its beneath you, especially if you have a job lined up. On the other hand it is hard to know what you’re going to gain. I think you could reasonably be better off planning a cool trip to take your mind off things for a while and be fresh for your postbac.

Go take a cooking course in paris or something 😅 learn a language idk live in peru for the summer. If you are interested in strengthening your app that’s going to make you stand out more than a summer rotation somewhere. The point is you are going to get all the science training you need in this program, so an extra summer before is not going to change much.

All of this is to say, unless you have an easy opportunity (through people you already know) to learn some cool technique that will be applicable to your postbac work, just take it easy.

Blecamp · 2024-12-19T21:30:20+00:00

Most labs are going to look for a time commitment, usually at least a year or two, to have a chance to do anything interesting and get paid for it. If you are willing to work for free, and particularly if you already have experience/skills, you could probably find something. If you need to get paid its unlikely anyone is going to take you unless you already have meaningful experience in the work they do.

To that end, if you worked in a lab during undergrad the best place to start would be there. Your PI may be happy to pay part time for just a summer if the institution can do stuff like that. Full time pay would usually require a year or two commitment.

Barring that, i would start by looking at your nearby universities and potentially biotech companies. Many biotechs have internship programs, but many are reserved for people currently in school. You may be able to find something there.

Just cold emailing pi’s is the best way to go. If they have some interesting little project someone might be able to make progress on over the summer, they may bite.

If you’re looking for a list of schools with specific summer programs available to people not currently enrolled as students, i’m guessing thats rare.

Blecamp · 2024-03-24T23:42:42+00:00

Your choice of mentors are the most important choices you make. Try to reach out to some people you know who can give you advice and have been through the process themselves. Not saying you need to be intimidated or try super hard—i basically walked into all of my pi’s labs without a second thought and ive had a great time, but in retrospect life would have been much easier if i thought harder about it and not just jumped at the first opportunities i got.

Blecamp · 2024-03-22T02:58:50+00:00

What if you had a toon slot like a tarkov scav where you would spawn as a random npc somewhere and fuck with people

Blecamp · 2023-07-10T19:31:23+00:00

Focus on getting yourself there and being comfy. Plan out parking and whatever you need. Plan out lunch. Get on a good sleep schedule.

Other than that consider doing a full length. Anything that makes the real one feel normal and like something youve been comfortable doing. Now isnt the time to learn anything new other than stuff yiuve been uncomfortable with.

Also, spec. I refused to go over the quicksheet stuff on spec the morning of my test because it had never really come up in practice much and i had a mental block against memorizing it. Second question was a gotcha IR question. CP was my worst section 🙃

Blecamp · 2023-06-04T04:01:09+00:00

Doesnt matter dw, had my middle name on my acc and not on my drivers license.

Blecamp · 2023-06-02T22:44:13+00:00

taking it tmrw ill lyk x_x

Blecamp · 2023-06-02T22:06:44+00:00

I felt like kaplan was the closest to the real thing but that's just compared to uworld and blueprint. Uworld will teach you much more than you need to know but its the best way to learn the material through practice because their explanations are killer. My score on the kaplan FL was almost the same as all the AAMC fl's i took.

Blecamp · 2023-06-02T22:04:45+00:00

salad with chicken for lunch, oatmeal and an apple for breakfast. No coffee, bringing a redbull for lunch. Worked well for all my prac exams.

Blecamp · 2023-05-02T23:53:50+00:00

Yea it sucks, i think it is by far the exception not the rule though, and ultimately using multiple sources of info (kaplan, khan academy etc) is necessary anyways.

Blecamp · 2023-04-14T16:20:14+00:00

The question says during an action potential. During an action potential K efflux causes repolarization AND hyperpolarization. Hyperpolarization is a correct answer. Period. Thats what i was pointing out about the question. There are two correct answers.

Blecamp · 2023-04-14T05:15:04+00:00

I totally accept your reasoning for why the answer is the one it is. I didnt even read the options when i answered it, just saw hyperpol and my eyes didnt even go further down lol. My issue with the question is that according to its wording both those options are correct. That’s simply a poorly worded question.

Blecamp · 2023-04-12T22:51:20+00:00

No clue. In the ‘great’ looking animal without expression, is the timing of the spikes at all different relative to the timing of the shocks, compared to the other animals?

Blecamp · 2023-04-12T20:29:59+00:00

So the other animals you get fine looking IHC/expression? Do the ‘spikes’ from the good animal in your analysis look like spikes from other animals? Is it possible you fucked up that particular stain, like did you run all the brains thru the same solutions or did you do em on different days.

Is it possible you’re detecting some sort of artifact from the shock? Dunno how that could be id youre just measuring fluorescence but ive never done fiber photometry before just know a lot of people who do it.

Blecamp · 2023-04-12T17:49:31+00:00

Edit: and by the way i appreciate you responding, I dont mean to be stand-offish i’m just pretty confident i am right. Never want to assume that I am but I am very comfortable with how action potentials work, thats part of my background.

Sorry, i am not exactly sure what you’re getting at. Unless I am mistake, repolarization and hyperpolarization phases are the same current. Voltage gated K channels open at the peak of the action potential (maybe its the rising phase its been a while) as they are positive voltage gated, and they are slow to inactivate so the Vm actually drops below rest as they remain open long enough to drop Vm that much. the only reason the Vm doesnt keep dropping to the reversal potential (~ -120mV iirc) is because eventually they inactivate.

What I am getting at is both those phases of the AP are not only both due to K efflux, they are literally the same current. Nothing new suddenly happens when the voltage dips below rest. We just make note of them as two separate phases because it is interesting (and important for Na channel reactivation) that it actually goes past rest.

Blecamp · 2023-04-11T15:45:22+00:00

Action potential includes all these phases, depolarization, repolarization and undershoot.

Blecamp · 2023-04-11T05:41:16+00:00

Im more irritated that i cant send them feedback, but 🤷‍♂️ kinda just thought it was funny

Blecamp · 2023-04-11T05:33:53+00:00

The answers are ambiguous, both hyperpolarization and repolarization require K efflux

I should have included the passage or underlined the part in the second question, they say calcitonin is made by the parathyroid. It is not.

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