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The loss of Zzzzzzs was for my interview at Pitt Med. A big day. And I feel pretty good about it.

I'd never really 'prepared' for an interview before. I mean, I would definitely review what I've done lately and try to think of a few key questions to ask, but I always avoided rehearsing for fear of sounding too practiced. And that logic totally sounds right-- if you can a response, you're going to sound canned. Connected with that is if you go in confident about yourself, you can answer any question because an interview is just a bunch of questions about yourself.

Well this weekend I went contrary to my previous wisdom. I STUDIED my ass off. I didn't even study for my courses because I was too busy preparing for this interview. In fact, I may have gone a little overboard given that I had prepared about a days worth of topics to discuss so many layers deep in detail that the 2-3 hours of interviewing could never have necessitated such studying. But included in the amazing life lessons Lyle gave was the 5 P's. Prior Preparation Prevents Poor Performance. And I remember thinking how corny that was as I prepared my lesson plans-- and then next day struggle to present what I had intended to teach in any cohesive form. It wasn't until I realized that my 5th hour class was receiving a far superior education than my 2nd hours class (we didn't have a 1st hour-- gosh life was good)-- and even after my fourth iteration of a lesson I was never canned-- I was Prepared.

So yes, I went back through every topic of conversation I could think of and found the common lapses of knowledge I'd face-- I want to talk about our (Jess+me) food odyssey to Toronto, but what the hell are those Japanese oysters called? Yes Pittsburgh's an intense sports town, but which football player's statue stands next to George Washington's at the airport representing the priorities of pittsburgh, Our first president, and a really great running back named...

I also wrote out my responses to why I want to be a doctor, why pitt, what's my research about. And I even put a notecard with the my answers in my pocket as an old extemp trick to make you feel comfortable that the answer's there even though you can't look at it.

I don't want to go into the details of the day online, but as you may be able to tell, I'm still reliving the experience, and I feel really good about how it went (which is good because I was so scared before it happened).