Someone peed on my car
Since my last blog I have finished up my semester, taken a ten day break at home, started up a new semester, and had someone pee on my car...while I was in it. As always, it has been pretty eventful.
My semester ended up well, but I can't say that I absolutely love exam time. I had three sizable papers and a 48-hour take-home final for my law class. My first paper was on the ethical obligations of television dramas to portray accurate scientific and medical information to the public if it's conceivable to do so. Meaning, that if the information exists television dramas cannot just make things up because, in many cases, it becomes a hazard to public health. It was certainly a fun and interesting paper to write, but it had it's shortcomings. The take-home message of our paper is that television dramas, at the very least, have an obligation to offer a balanced view of controversial issues so as to not completely misinform the public. The reason why this is so important is because a significant portion of Americans do not have the reading comprehension levels to get information elsewhere and are essentially at the mercy of what the television tells them. And, especially with TV dramas, people think what they're seeing is an accurate portrayal of what actually happens.
My next paper was for my narrative ethics class. For this paper I designed a medical ethics teambuilding program for clinical teams in a hospital setting. The goal of the exercise was to build a positive and respectful atmosphere for everyone on a clinical team and teach everyone on the clinical team to value the varied moral perspectives of others in order to expand the narrative of the patient. The exercise essentially involves clinical teams reading and discussing short doctor or patient narratives and attempting to glean all the possible moral considerations that may or may not be in the narrative. Hopefully, the members of the clinical team will use what they learn and apply it to the hospital setting. This is just a rough sketch of the teambuilding exercise, but you get the idea.
My third paper was for my moral philosophy class. I'll spare everyone the details on this one (because they weren't my own ideas!). Basically, what we had to do was discuss the narrative movement in bioethics and how understanding narratives and stories contributes to medical ethics. Interesting and important stuff, so good thing I took a whole class on it.
AND finally, my 48-hour champion law school exam. It was a typical law school exam (or so I'm told) that involved a fact pattern question and theory question. The fact pattern question involved analyzing a fake public health policy, offering all the legal objections, and making policy suggestions to make the policy legally and socially more acceptable. The theory question allotted us 2500 words to create a coherent theory of public health and two examples of this theory in action. As my professor later told me, if you can come up with a legitimate theory of public health in 2500 words then you have the potential for a bright career in public health! Well hooray for that. Naw, I like public health, and so do you! Next time, she should probably give us something that's possible within the word limits.
THEN, I went home and had some fun in the Midwestern behemoth, Chicago, with former camel Emily Gagen. There was also a sizable amount of merriment in my Midwestern gem, Milwaukee! That's right, it's my gem. More on that next time.
Oh yeah, someone really did pee on my car in Philly, but I'll talk about that next time too. It gives everyone something to look forward to. Stay smelly camels!