Day #1
Augusta GreenJacket’s Bobby Felmy makes a head-first dive into third base against the Hickory Crawdads - Photo by John M. Setzler, Jr.
I started my journey along the Road to Radiography this morning as my fall semester classes began at 10am. My community college has a record enrollment this semester with just over 5000 students. THIS was the first problem I encountered when I arrived at school this morning. I’m glad I got to campus about 20 minutes early, because all the parking lots were stuffed full. As the case would be, I found a parking spot, but it was on the far opposite side of campus from my classes. I guess it’s about a 1/3 mile hike from where I parked to my building. That’s not so bad normally. I can use the exercise, but it was 93 degrees when I got to school. During my last two semesters, I had classes at 7am, and parking was never an issue. I usually arrived on campus around 630am and had my pick of prime parking spots. Despite the huge parking hassle, I still made it to class with about 5 minutes to spare. I have a rolling book bag, so the trip across campus wasn’t that bad… just hot.
RAD-110 - Rad Intro & Patient Care
My 10am class is taught by Bruce James. The first day of class is never very difficult. We received the course syllabus and photocopies of all the physical and immunization records that we turned in before classes started. One of my clinical sites requires all that information, so I need to make sure I get it delivered to them around mid-September (makes a mental note to add that to his calendar). The RAD-110 course also includes Medical Terminology, rather than having that as a separate class. The Medical Terminology portion of this class will be conducted online, and it’s basically self-paced and self-taught with the textbook we purchased and the tutorial CD ROM included with it. Bruce stressed that staying on schedule with that program is important. Bruce’s MO for teaching is using PowerPoint presentations. All of the presentations are available online, so I need to go download those so I’ll have them on file here for study purposes.
Today’s class discussion was “Infection Control & Aseptic Technique.” For the most part, this discussion was terms and definitions, along with discussion of the Cycle of Infection.
RAD-111 - Rad Procedures I
My 11am class is taught by Teresa Fletcher. The first part of this class was much the same as the previous class. We received a syllabus and discussed the course schedule. Teresa also uses PowerPoint presentations, but as far as I know, those aren’t available online. She gave us printed copies of them. I need to make a note to ask her if we can get digital copies of those. Today’s lecture in this class was also a lot of terms and definitions dealing with body positioning and planes. The great thing about this lecture is that very little of it was new. Most of it was covered in my Anatomy & Physiology classes from the last two semesters.
Half of my class has the 3-hour lab for this class on Monday (today) and the other half has the lab on Tuesday (tomorrow). I’m in the Tuesday group, so my Monday is rather easy with a 10-Noon schedule.
Daily Objective:
I have a lot of free time today since I’m not working tonight. My objectives for today are to get the online orientation and biography completed. I also want to work through the first week’s assignment in the Medical Terminology book. I have reading assignments from both classes that I will start on, and I’ll make my study flashcards for everything that we have covered so far.
Congrats on your first day and way to jump on the studying right away! :)