The Lottery

No, not the one where you can potentially win lots and lots of money. I'm talking about the lottery that happened at school yesterday during which all 223 (or so) students in my class chose our 3rd year rotation sites.

Is this a blog-worthy event? Probably not, but I'm tired of seeing the one about the robbery.

Because Dave and I are married, and because Dave lives in Bakersfield, I got a higher ranking. The top 5% GPA students as well as the people with spouses or dependents (if the spouse or dependent is living in the city where the rotation site is) got top priority and were assigned a random number for the lottery. I was pick #30! There were about 50 people in the top priority category, so to speak. The other 170+ people were also randomly assigned numbers. My friend Carolyn was #168...ouch! A lot of sites were full by the time she got to pick.

There are 20 possible sites, some of which allow 15 students, and some of which only accept 2-8. Some of the ones that only accept a few students are Portland, Hawaii, Redding, Chico, Loma Linda, Santa Rosa, Merced, and Monterey. The full sites include San Francisco, Stockton, Fresno, Santa Barbara, Sacramento, San Jose, Long Beach, Palo Alto, Travis, and LA/Orange County. This year, the Bakersfield site was expanded and now accepts 20 people!

Once your name/number was called, you had 2 minutes to make your selection. I was the 3rd person to choose Bakersfield, and the site was full before the lottery was finished! Santa Barbara didn't even fill up. Does that make any sense to anyone?? Who would pick Bakersfield over Santa Barbara? Besides me, of course :) Most people didn't need the two minutes, but once a lot of the sites had filled up there was some drama. One of my classmates bought a house with her fiancee in Elk Grove (up here near Sacramento), but Sacramento was full by the time she got to choose! So she was on the phone frantically trying to decide where to go in 2 minutes. She chose Bakersfield :)

I wasn't exactly worried about being able to get Bakersfield, because the chances weren't very good that 20 people in front of me would choose it, but it's really nice to know FOR SURE that I get to go HOME in August! I think I'll slowly start sending things back to Bakersfield with Dave when he comes to visit...or my mom...not that I have THAT much stuff up here with me. Maybe I'll make a trip home after midterms later this month.

YAY for being almost half way through 5th semester! Only 1.5 semesters left to go! Then 6 6-week rotations starting in Bakersfield in August and I'll graduate in May 2009. Once I graduate I just have to take (and pass) the State Board Exam to get licensed. There's a light at the end of the tunnel!

I'm really looking forward to rotations to find out what I really want to do as a pharmacist. 4 of the 6-week rotations are mandatory (hospital inpatient, community pharmacy(AKA retail, like at Longs), ambulatory care, and internal medicine). 2 of the 6-week rotations are electives, meaning we get to choose what else we want to do. One of the electives offered in Bakersfield that sounds REALLY interesting is physiatry (not a spelling error--I'd never heard of it either!) which deals with rehabilitation from brain and spinal cord injuries. I don't know what else I'll choose, yet.

Sorry if you read this whole thing and it wasn't til the end that you realized there was nothing interesting in it! Hopefully it helped you kill some time, anyway :)