Utah Trip

Its late and I should be in bed, but I thought "Why not blog about our recent trip to Utah?" Warning, this is going to be one of those boring "travel logs" (like the "quotes"?)
Originally, our plan was to leave on Friday morning after I got off of work, but then we heard a storm was going to be coming thru so we decided to postpone it til Saturday. Really glad we did. We were going to leave by 6am Saturday morning, but we didn't finish packing and cleaning til 2 am and when we woke up, there was chain restrictions over the pass so we decided to sleep a little longer. We slept a couple more hours and, although there were still chain restrictions when we left, the storm had passed and the sun was up so we hoped they would be lifted by the time we got there. We were checking the road conditions the whole way on our phone and they were slowly getting lifted, section by section. At one point we saw the sign that said chains required in 16miles, but then traffic slowed to a crawl and by the time we traveled the 16miles, the chain restrictions were lifted. We finally arrived in Provo at my brother and sister-in-law's house at about 11pm. Sunday we went to Church with them, and afterwards, my sister, whose in BYU's nursing program, came over for dinner. Sunday afternoon, we let the kids play in the snow in the back yard and Will and I made a snow man for the kids. Monday, we went to our friends, Jason and Amanda's house, where we stayed the rest of the week. Our kids became fast friends with their friends and some tears were shed when we had to leave. Monday afternoon, my sister introduced me to one of her professors who has a very important title at the pharmacy school I was interviewing at. Probably the biggest piece of advice he gave me was to make a good impression on the faculty interviewer, don't do anything to make them not like me.
Tuesday, we looked at apartments and picked up some applications. Wednesday, we drove up to Ogden to visit our friends Aaron and Ashley. Had a good visit with them and had a laugh over the brain pizza their daughter was eating. :-)
Thursday, I had my interview at the pharmacy school. The questions were of a different style than I got last year but I still felt good about it. During the orientation, the Dean explained that they received 800 applications, offered 600 interviews and have spots for 245 new students.
Our original plan was to stay Friday and drive home Saturday but Thursday night we decided that it would be better to drive home Friday instead. The kids were getting tired of being away from home and we realized it would be nice to have Saturday to recover from the trip. The drive home Friday was uneventful and their was no concerns about chains and road conditions. The kids did great on the drives and we were all grateful to be home. Now we just gotta get back into the swing of things with work and school and housekeeping, etc. And now we just play the waiitng game to see if I get in. Hopefully good things are in store for us.

Graduation Day

Yesterday was commencement exercises for CSU Chico. I have finally graduated and now hold a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology with a minor emphasis in Spanish. Here are a few photos of the event and a video. I hope you enjoy:

This is before the commencement exercises

Can you see how excited they are for me?

Walking into the Stadium

She was exhausted, we had to wake her up to get there on time. Apparently, she put the blanket over her head and put herself to sleep.

After the exercises.

In front of the main sign on campus.

Everybody in front of the main sign on campus.

USN Interview and visit

Yesterday I flew out to Las Vegas for orientation, campus tour, and interview at the University of Southern Nevada College of Pharmacy to see a few pictures (taken on my cell phone) of the trip you can follow this link. Corrina, the kids and I left Chico @ 7am and drove down to Sacramento to drop me off at the airport. (Corrina then had fun with my siblings and their kids, you'll have to ask her for the details). There was a little bit of turbulence coming into Las Vegas but it wasn't bad, felt like a roller coaster :-). I caught a taxi cab over to the pharmacy school, did my thing there, and caught a cab back to the airport. I got to the airport @ 5:15 and my flight didn't leave til 8 so I was glad I brought reading material. Corrina picked me up @ SMF and then we drove straight home to Chico, arriving after 11pm. It was a long day and went well.


Oh, wait...You probably want details about how the interview went. :-)
First we had an orientation explaining tuition, how the program works, and all that. Then we had campus tours by current students while we waited for our interview, after our interview, we could leave.

This school runs on a block system so you study only one subject at a time, 6 hours a day 4-5 days a week. From 8am - 3pm you have lecture for an hour then a group project/assignment for an hour, etc. In your 1st year, one Friday you work in a community pharmacy while the next Friday is assessment day (individual and group) This school works on a pass/fail system and you have to get 90% to pass. If you pass your individual assessment on Friday you don't have to come on Monday to redo it. If your group gets a 95% on your group assessment, you get 5 extra % points on your individual assessment. the first 6 weeks of summer after your first year, you do a community pharmacy rotation then the next 6 weeks you have a break unless you have to redo a block because you didn't pass the re-assessment on Monday. P2 year is a lot like P1 but then after that, you don't get any break and you immediately start your P3 year, which is entirely 6-week rotations. There are 8 sets of 6 weeks and you only have to do 7 rotations, the 8th is a break unless you have to redo any blocks from your P2 year. There are 4 required rotations and 3 elective that you kind of get to choose.

How they decide who to accept:
First they look at your application/grades/etc. and assign you a score that determines if you are even offered an interview. Then your interview is scored and the two scores are added together to get a total score. That total score goes into a spreadsheet of everyone from highest score to lowest and they start at the top and work their way down until all spots are filled in both campuses (There's one in Henderson Nevada and one in South Jordan, Utah but they are the exact same policies and same curriculum, sometimes they even fly faculty back and forth to teach their specialty on both campuses) If you are accepted and space is available on both campuses, you can choose which one you want to go to.

So to explain the poll at the top of the right hand column: (if you are reading this as a note on Facebook, follow this link to get to my blog)
(*disclaimer: I'm not saying its a sure thing I will have a choice if I'm accepted, this is more for curiosity sake, although as of yesterday, they did have seats available on both campuses)

If you were accepted and were given the choice as to which campus to attend, which would you choose: Henderson, NV (a suburb of Las Vegas) or South Jordan, UT (A suburb of SLC). Feel free to give your reasoning as well. I think I can predict what the outcome will be, but I am going to keep that to myself so as not to affect the poll.

Oh yeah, one more interesting thing: In the orientation he said, if you are put on the wait list, never give up hope! He shared two instances where they accepted someone either a few days before or the day classes started. One student was sitting on a plane waiting for it to pull back from the gate to fly to a different school when he got the call asking if he still wanted to go to USN. He yelled at the flight attendant to not let the plane leave, he had to get off. He then went to the ticket counter and bought the first ticket to Las Vegas he could get. Another student was driving on his way to UNLV the first day of class when he got the call asking if he still wanted in. He immediately turned around and drove straight to USN and started class. Crazy!