Jenny's best advice, one line at a time
Some advice needs a whole post. Some of it fits in a sentence you end up repeating to yourself in the car before an exam. Readers keep a surprising number of these one-liners - which is the argument for letting them collect somewhere tappable.
Best advice, one line at a time
Every line below is lifted straight from a post on this blog, named and linked - tap the card for the next one, copy the one you need on exam morning.
Sample passage - physics territory
The tradeoff behind every probe choice
Every scan starts with the same quiet negotiation: detail or depth. You cannot have both, and the fastest way to feel that - faster than any paragraph - is to move a slider and watch what the beam gives up as it reaches deeper.
Frequency vs. depth slider
One slider, one picture of the most-tested tradeoff in ultrasound physics, with axial resolution computed rather than asserted. It lives in the physics post now.
Topic practice quiz
A small block of verified board-style questions served by topic from the tagged question bank - the machinery already runs; only verified questions would feed it.
Sample passage - history territory
Facts you will repeat at parties
The history of ultrasound is full of details that sound made up - the sound of icebergs, the cattle farm experiments, the first machine you sat in like a dentist's chair. Facts like these want to be collected, flipped through, and sent to the group chat.
Did You Know? shareable fact cards
Reveal cards, each naming the book and page its fact came from. Two of the original three were unsourced and were replaced with facts the reference library carries. They live in the history post.
Sample passage - prerequisites territory
The list nobody can hand you
Every few weeks somebody asks for the prerequisite checklist, and there is no such thing. Each program writes its own, publishes it on its own site, and changes it when it feels like it. The honest answer is not a checklist. It is a place to keep the three lists that actually apply to you, side by side, with the accredited directory doing the part a person should not have to do by hand.
Program requirements tracker
Search the CAAHEP accredited directory, pin up to three programs, and keep each one's requirements in its own column: the seven common courses as a per-program status, plus their GPA line, science GPA, observation hours, entrance exam, letters and application window. Accreditation status, award, specialties and the director's contact come from the live directory feed with its pull date stamped on the card; the requirement fields are the reader's own notes from the program's admissions page, and the footer says so rather than implying the site knows them. Two programs or more and a compare view lines every field up side by side, marking the rows where the programs do not agree. It lives in the prerequisites post.
Where the money actually comes from
Most students assemble school money from scraps: a state grant here, a hospital tuition-reimbursement program there, one scholarship nobody at their school had heard of. The scraps exist. What has never existed is one current list of them.
Scholarship and funding finder
The national awards written for sonography students, read off each sponsor's own page and stamped with the date they were read, plus the higher education agency in every state and the District of Columbia, pulled from the federal directory. Every deadline is computed from the reader's own date against the cycle the sponsor publishes, so no date is typed into the page and nothing can quietly expire. A scheduled checker re-reads the links, separates a site that refuses a robot from one that is genuinely gone, and withholds a link a reader would land on nothing from. It lives in the degrees post.
Infrastructure - not reader-facing
What the boards and polls are waiting on
Nine post ideas across this blog are anonymous boards, walls, or polls. The shared piece they were waiting on is built: one submissions service with a moderation queue, so nothing a reader types appears under this site's name until it has been reviewed. Four boards run on it now - "What's your real why?" on the intro post, "My rejection story" on prerequisites, "My first scan story" on clinicals, and "What cost me weeks" on the ARDMS post. Every one displays only after approval, and an empty board renders empty rather than inventing examples.
Polls are counted separately, because a poll publishes a number rather than a note. Votes are rows, percentages are computed from those rows when the results are read, and below ten votes the poll shows raw counts instead of a share that a handful of votes cannot carry. The "If I could do it over" poll on the degrees post is the first one.
The second shared piece is the accuracy footer: every widget that states a fact carries its source name, whether it auto-updates, the last-reviewed date, and the method. The salary estimator set the pattern, and every expiring figure on the blog now reads a feed - wages from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, exam pass rates from the ARDMS annual report, accredited programs from CAAHEP.
Tools that keep themselves current
The feeds specced in the catalog, in preference order. Shared shape: a scheduled job writes a JSON feed, widgets read the feed, and the source stamp renders from the feed itself - a stale feed shows its staleness instead of hiding it.
- CAAHEP program search - live now at sitm-caahep.pages.dev; embeds into post 03 and links from post 05.
- Program requirements tracker - live now in post 03. The roster and every accreditation fact read the CAAHEP feed; per-program requirements are the reader's own entries until the extraction pipeline in the build spec is built and its review gate is staffed.
- BLS salary feed - the salary estimator's data refreshed on each annual BLS release instead of baked into the page.
- Tuition via College Scorecard - published tuition for the exact program a reader picks, feeding the post 02 cost calculator.
- ARDMS fee panel - current fees on a checked feed for post 10, flagging changes for review rather than publishing them blind.
- Funding feed - live now in post 02. Three layers that say where each came from: awards read by hand off each sponsor's page, the Pell maximum pulled from the letter that sets it, and every state's higher education agency pulled from the federal directory.