Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Seats of Power

Well . . . it's been a while since I last blogged. Seems like no one missed me. I'm not particularly surprised. Not much has happened, exams coming up next week that I should be worrying more about.

First, there are things I need to learn to let go. While I'm not an argumentative or confrontational person (at least, I hope I'm not), there are a handful of things that do get to me and really rile me up. I won't discuss what they are here. Suffice to say, I've encountered several of those in the last 2 weeks or so. I think I'm okay now.

Second, I reached my 3-mile run goal last week! :-D I haven't run 3 miles yet this week, as I played basketball instead on Sunday and yesterday with my roommate and some friends. I'm sore all over from basketball (especially my lower back where lumbar transitions to sacral, and my butt).

Third, I'm now in a few "seats of power," muahahaha. As the new co-president, I just had the APAMSA (Asian Pacific American Medical Student Association) change-over meeting from the old executive board to us, the new executive board. I have a . . . thing with power, more specifically "organizational" power. See, the first thing I do is to organize things. It borders on pathological OCD I think. I have this itch to reorganize certain things my way. I mean, honestly, I went through the entire massive APAMSA continuity binder (full of crap, btw) and took out lots of old stuff from 2000-2004 that we almost certainly won't utilize. As long as I'm barred from this "power," I could care less. Anyway, I have big things planned for this group, lol.

I'm the co-chair of FMSA (Family Medicine student Association) Patient Education. The other co-chair and I have been collaborating with the free clinic managers and putting our schemes and plans slowly into motion, even though the FMSA change-over meeting hasn't occurred yet. We're slowly politicking ourselves with members of the free clinic managers to gain support - the intrigue is . . . interesting, to say the least. Again, major plans set in motion for this program. Hopefully what we envision will turn out great for both student volunteers and patients.

Lastly, somehow (I'm not entirely sure how) I've been "hand picked" to be the new (co-?)president of the LGBTPM (LGBT People in Medicine) group by the outgoing co-presidents. I made myself clear that I refused to be president if it's just going to be me running it, as I can't do it alone; other than that, I was more than happy. Apparently they "found" 2 other interested members. But unlike APAMSA or FMSA Patient Education, I've no solid goals/visions for LGBTPM. It's a very small and dying group, I almost want to declare it un-salvageable. But I'll try my best to "revive" it, perhaps by first renaming it as the "People in Medicine" bit is rather confusing. There also needs to be an "A" for "Ally" in the title somewhere. I wish the LGBT acronym had more vowels that it could actually spell something pronounceable. Maybe "B.L.T.GAlly" (Bacon Lettuce Tomato GAlly?), lol. I'm just being silly.

Anyway, seats of power! Co-president of APAMSA, co-chair of FMSA Patient Education, and (co-)president of LGBTPM. Time to implement the changes I want and hopefully everything goes smoothly. 2010-2011 is going to be quite the busy year.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yay, Aek! That's great news!

I'm going to be co-leader for two of the student groups at my medical school next year too.

By the way, my school's LGBT group basically just holds a few social events with the other grad students or the other med schools in our area. That's pretty much it.

Anonymous said...

I always liked to take positions of power, but ones which did not get direct attention from the group, like treasurer or secretary. I'm still in the position of organization, but someone else is ultimately responsible. ;) But that's awesome that you'll have control over some things.

Anyway, sorry for aggravating you early, I know I was one of those people. And I personally really did miss you. *hugs*