Weekly Report (3/20-3/27)

This past week in ISM helped me to get a better grasp on my final product, and it worked to set everything in motion for Final Presentation Night. On Wednesday, the 22nd, Dr. Mansour and I finally met after a long two weeks of waiting for schedule conflicts to resolve. We discussed mainly the future of my final product, as Dr. Mansour will definitely have a large impact in regards to the success of the project. While we discussed various topics relating to weight loss, we mainly discussed what types of questions I want to answer with this paper and how we can answer those questions. It was incredibly beneficial for me to sit down with Dr. Mansour and discuss my final product, because it showed me what it was like to draft a descriptive or research paper as a physician with a real problem to fix. We decided that we were going to focus on whether or not there are preoperative factors that can accelerate or decelerate postoperative weight loss, as well as what a typical weight loss trend for patients undergoing either distal or total gastrectomies looks like. Some of the factors we are analyzing are as simple as age and gender, but we are also analyzing some more complicated factors, like socioeconomic status.