Edward's Pharmacology ePortfolio

December service hours: 4 Cumulative service hours: 12 The first half of December was a busy time for me, but overall went very well. I had my third and final presentation of the semester shortly before our last exams which proved challenging, but continued to teach me better time management. I was also fortunate to get the opportunity to see my brother along with quality time with my friends and other family members. My brother lives in California so it is always a rare treat when he returns to New Orleans to visit. In terms of community service, I had the opportunity to work with Second Harvest Food Bank for my last community service experience of the semester. I volunteered on the 6th of December and helped them at their facility in Elmwood in the early morning. Although I had always heard good things about Second Harvest, the experience exceeded my expectations of how it would go. Everyone in the organization was very friendly and grateful for the help of every volunteer. For the d...

 November service hours: 0 Cumulative service hours: 8 Although a great month as a whole, November surely kept me on my toes and was a very busy month. The curriculum started off with the Cardiovascular system which proved to be the most difficult yet rewarding module to date. The cardiovascular system was filled with medications and information that was familiar to me from past experiences. This made the module even more interesting and feel very applicable to real life. An added bonus was that we were able to participate in a CV patient simulation. The simulation allowed us to get a feel for what it is like to treat a CV patient ourselves without any risk to a real patient. We started off asking "Mr Boudreaux" questions about his symptoms and history, but had to react on the fly as he needed emergency treatment for various ailments. The whole experience was very memorable and a perfect introduction into educational medical simulations. After getting through a tough CV exam,...

This month I was very pleased to be able to get my first opportunity to volunteer and help out. I was a group leader at GiST which stands for Girls in STEM at Tulane. STEM is an acronym for the subjects within this program and stood for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. This is a program designed to empower middle school girls to pursue careers in these fields and foster their passion for these subjects in the process. The program was held on October 29th at the Boggs building just off of Freret street. GiST initially started with a science scavenger hunt where we led small groups of girls to classrooms where different types of scientific stations were set up. There were informative presentations or more hands on exhibitions set up in each of the classrooms. The two stations that were clear favorites amongst my group were the NASA and the robotic vehicle stations. The robotic vehicle was very interactive because the girls were allowed to drive it around. They even had a camer...

 Hey there, My name is Edward ("Teddy") Benjamin and I am a Pharmacology Graduate student at Tulane. I will be blogging each month about my volunteer hours and my experiences as a student in the Pharmacology program.  I went to Sewanee: The University of the South for undergraduate education and am a New Orleans native. I majored in Biology in undergrad, but I had a healthy dose of many different subjects including Math, Econ, Chemistry, and Spanish during my time at Sewanee. It was a fairly rigorous academic program, but the adjustment to graduate student life has been challenging especially with a difficult program like Pharmacology. I have previously taken a class, Calc II, at Tulane, but it was ages ago so there was a lot of stuff to reacquaint myself with regarding Tulane and classes. Thankfully the staff has been very helpful with this process and always makes themselves available for questions in person or through email if need be. This made the transition much easier,...