Books aside - useful, but not the most important part of learning - however,
experience is.

Probably the best piece of advice (given your situation and learning challenges)
is practice - ensure that you're undertaking practicum with a practitioner, or a
number of these, beyond that undertaken as part of your course. Experiential
learning will be of most value to you, and with any student for that matter,
seeing theory put to practice, you will remember all the better. So, look in
your local residential area and start approaching some practitioners and ask
them if you can come to their clinic for work experience (observation
initially), once or twice a week to begin with. You never know, there may even
be paid work in the offering! As you learn different skills and techniques in
your studies you can assist with more of the clinical work. In time, you will
also build a great network of practitioners, even from other professions, and be
set for you're own clinical practice upon graduation.

Best wishes,

Sean.

Dr Sean Walsh, Ph.D.
Senior Lecturer
Dept Medical and Molecular Biosciences
University of Technology, Sydney
Ph: +61 2 9514 7864

UTS CRICOS Provider No. 00099F

----- Original Message -----
From: Erik <thehatinthecat@...>
Date: Tuesday, March 10, 2009 1:50 am
Subject: [PulseDiagnosis] Where to Start? Any advice for a new student.
To: PulseDiagnosis@yahoogroups.com


> Hello all,
> Some of you may remember last year I posted saying that I was going to
> be becoming a new student at Kansas College of Chinese Medicine. For
> a number of reasons that didn't happen. However working with the
> state of Missouri's Vocational Rehabilitation I am on track to
> starting this fall quarter at the Midwest College of Oriental
> Medicine's Chicago campus.
> I am going for the whole ball of wax, doing the Master's in Oriental
> Medicine so of course as you all know that will include herbalism.
> I'm really looking forward to starting to my formal studies, and I was
> wondering what advice anyone had for someone starting out.
> Books people would suggest that are a MUST for a new learners library,
> techniques (such as Pulse Diagnosis) that one should really focus on etc.
>
> A little background to help people understand me and my journey here
> to TCM.
> At an early age I was diagnosed with a number of Learning Disabilities
> (hence why I'm working with Vocational Rehab.). I spent two years at
> the Hillside School in Macungie PA a primer private school focused on
> helping children with learning disabilities. Through their work and
> the work of my parents (both educators) I was able return to the main
> stream in less then two years with little need for the resource room.
> I continued to learn how to use my different learning styles and how
> to become a self-advocate to the point of from 8th grade on I was an
> active participant in my IEP planning.
>
> From 8-12th grade I went to a private religious school in Upstate NY
> that had little understand or help for those with learning
> disabilities so I helped to educate the teachers on my needs and
self-advocated.
>
> I received a AS in Liberal Arts and then went to Goddard College and
> got a BA in Health Arts and Sciences in Male Adolescent Psychology and
> Rites of Passage. I worked for two summers at the Omega Institute in
> New York. Through working there and many of my fellow students at
> Goddard, I learned more about alternative health and met a number of
> people who inspired me to start to take a deeper look into other ways
> of healing beyond Western Medicine and psychology which was where I
> first thought of doing my graduate work.
> I had studied Tai chi and Qigong and enjoyed them and was thinking of
> ways to integrate them into my studies of social work planning on
> working on an MSW.
>
> However after moving to Missouri, I got a job working in the Family
> Support Division, and soon started to become disillusioned with the
> idea of working in the human services. Then one day I had not been
> doing any Tai Chi or Qigong in a while and I picked up Roger Jahnke's
> The Healing Promise of Qi. And there it was, just like a flash I
> realized that I didn't want to work in such a soul damaged field like
> social work (soul damaged as a whole, the systems so broken, and soul
> damaging because of how it is broken) I wanted to study oriental
> medicine and work at changing the world through that.
>
>
>

--
UTS CRICOS Provider Code: 00099F
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