The Pantanos

  In this blog post, I will be discussing Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality by Pauline Chen. This book is a biography/ personal narrative, and it  is divided into three sections; lessons in medical school, how professional responses manifest and perpetuate themselves, and the transformations in how doctors approach end-of-life care.  All the experiences she had deals with the problem of mortality and how "facing that mortality in ourselves is perhaps the most difficult task of all." Chen leads us into her laboratory facility before her cadaver dissection as she describes the lingering sharp and rancid aroma of formalehyde (formalehyde is a preservative used for cadavers). The smell got much worse as she was presented with the cadaver the next day. Her first response after being in the laboratory was how "unsettling [it was] to be presented with so little history, and it became more so as we allowed ourselves to become intimately familiar with every det

As part of Health class and Consumer Ed, I (and my classmates) made an Investopedia account and participated in a group stock investment game. After making some poor decisions (dropping my net worth down to 930k from 1m), I made a new account with a bit more success (1.05m from 1m). However, I felt the urge to learn more about the art of investing itself, which is why I chose The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham, a book considered a classic in the investing world.  Benjamin Graham is also known as the "father of value investing." This book focuses on the long-term and risk-averse approach to investing and focuses on research and factual data instead of predictions and speculations (which I had been doing). I picked up this book with the idea that it might help me improve in another area of investing, and it did not let me down.  The first thing he states is, simply put, the reasons people lose money: buying into the hype of bull markets, not doing your own research, re