My mom and I have recently developed a nasty habit of pre-med school shopping. After getting the full offer last week, preparations for med school next year has gone into full steam, buying tickets for flights, textbooks, arranging for visas, health checks and police screenings. It has been a hectic week.
Not to mention, tomorrow morning I’ll be heading down to KK Women and Children’s Hospital for an interview. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll probably be serving a short temporary tag on in the pediatrics’ emergency department to get some exposure and gain some context in which to better understand what I’ll be learning in slightly over 2 and a half months. And a little extra (which I’ll only blog about once I get into it…)
So today, mom and I went book shopping after a nice yummy brunch. We headed off to Yun Nan medical bookstore at Bras Basah and bought my first medical textbook! Kumar and Clark’s Clinical Medicine. I also managed to get Wheater’s Functional Histology, a book that was at least twice as expensive in Kino. The books were not only cheaper at Yun Nan, but the lady at the counter also gave us lots of very helpful advice on which books were good and which not to buy. While her tone was a tad condescending, I could really feel she was passionate about what she did, and really wanted to help. =) She was really knowledgeable about the books in her store, advising me which I would need, which were better or more popular, and suggesting some other books I might require in Year 1. Really nice lady.
We couldn’t find Netter’s Atlas of Human Anatomy there though, and she recommended we went to the NUS Co-op to find it. NUS was horrid to navigate about. Since neither mom nor I had any experience in NUS, we ended up spending most of our time driving in and out of carparks to nowhere and reversing out of dead ends. We did eventually find the medicine and science co-op and found a neat little stack of Netter’s. And having a quick flip through the pages, I can see what all the rage is about.

I have a suspicion that Netter’s was the book Hans Bacher was talking about when he spoke to me earlier this year about medical school. He mentioned he knew someone who did an arts degree, then went on to medical school, later becoming one of the world’s most famous medical illustrators. Netter is definitely one of them. And he graduated from design school too! His drawings are gorgeous and extremely detailed. I would have to struggle to turn off the drooling art student in me to study this book properly.
So after today’s purchases, my textbook stack has grown a little. Here it is next to my phone for some size comparison.

We later went on to Funan to 1. Buy ma’s outdated Korean drama, and 2. Drink arguably the best Ya Kun coffee in Singapore.
The shop turned out to no longer carry the outdated Korean drama, so after a quick coffee, we went about looking for luggage; an exercise that eventually turned into a hunt for a good netbook.
Now, I’m using a really pretty, fantastic, amazing Macbook Pro, currently. However, it does weigh a very hefty 2.5kg. As much as I love how it is awesome with pdf files and looks really pretty, I found myself looking at the much lighter, cheaper, and simpler netbooks. I’m terribly tempted to buy a Samsung N120 netbook simply to chuck in my bag and bring from class to class, then return home every night to write essays, make presentations, and do revisions on my larger macbook pro. Though I’m worried I might slowly lose the need to have two computers and eventually stop using either one. A decision on this would take a couple more weeks of thinking. Not like I’m pressed for time anyway…
So a bit more studying before sleep time. Tomorrow promises to be an exciting day.