(no subject)
After dropping off the face of the earth for a while, I have returned to... complain! (surprise!)
Sorry I haven't been commenting so much on all of your entries. I do read them!
So basically, the rest of last school year went really well academically. I pulled all my grades up to Bs and it was pretty cool, and I survived medical neuroscience, which was a serious feat.
Over the summer, I spent a month in Guatemala learning a whole lot of Spanish and working in a traveling clinic with a few classmates. Otherwise, I lay around a lot and spent a lot of time with Dan (who is now traveling) and we visited my parents and Liz and it was pretty much the best 'last free summer ever' I could've asked for.
Now I am 6 weeks into M2 year. This year, we have exams every 3 weeks, and there's way more material than last year. We take Pathology, Pharmacology, Immunology/Microbiology, and Clinical Neuroscience along with a few smaller classes about physical exam skills, diagnosis, patient safety, etc.
Right now, I am dying miserably of pharmacology! Last week, we were given about 60 cancer drugs which will be on Monday's test. We need to know how each one works, which cancers it can be used to treat, which drugs it's commonly combined with, its toxicities, any genetic variations that affect its metabolism, and anything else particularly notable about it. They're mostly all different, and the mechanisms of action don't really say much about which cancers which drugs work for or what the side effects will be.. and maybe the worst thing is they're all just random words. I'd heard of maybe 3 of them, and I'm having a hard enough time learning all the words without having to associate each of them with tons of other info. I just... have no concept of how to learn this stuff. And still I have to review 40+ lecture hours worth of material for other classes tomorrow. Dying!!
Also, I am mad at the pharm and immuno departments. I was looking through course info, and both of those classes grade on a curve with the class average set at "the lowest B." So on the last exam, the class average for immuno was 86.1%, which means that my 85.7% is a C. Not. Cool. I want to write angry emails about how penalizing us for doing well collectively isn't a good way to encourage us to work together and teach each other and stuff.
Overwhelmed!
Sorry I haven't been commenting so much on all of your entries. I do read them!
So basically, the rest of last school year went really well academically. I pulled all my grades up to Bs and it was pretty cool, and I survived medical neuroscience, which was a serious feat.
Over the summer, I spent a month in Guatemala learning a whole lot of Spanish and working in a traveling clinic with a few classmates. Otherwise, I lay around a lot and spent a lot of time with Dan (who is now traveling) and we visited my parents and Liz and it was pretty much the best 'last free summer ever' I could've asked for.
Now I am 6 weeks into M2 year. This year, we have exams every 3 weeks, and there's way more material than last year. We take Pathology, Pharmacology, Immunology/Microbiology, and Clinical Neuroscience along with a few smaller classes about physical exam skills, diagnosis, patient safety, etc.
Right now, I am dying miserably of pharmacology! Last week, we were given about 60 cancer drugs which will be on Monday's test. We need to know how each one works, which cancers it can be used to treat, which drugs it's commonly combined with, its toxicities, any genetic variations that affect its metabolism, and anything else particularly notable about it. They're mostly all different, and the mechanisms of action don't really say much about which cancers which drugs work for or what the side effects will be.. and maybe the worst thing is they're all just random words. I'd heard of maybe 3 of them, and I'm having a hard enough time learning all the words without having to associate each of them with tons of other info. I just... have no concept of how to learn this stuff. And still I have to review 40+ lecture hours worth of material for other classes tomorrow. Dying!!
Also, I am mad at the pharm and immuno departments. I was looking through course info, and both of those classes grade on a curve with the class average set at "the lowest B." So on the last exam, the class average for immuno was 86.1%, which means that my 85.7% is a C. Not. Cool. I want to write angry emails about how penalizing us for doing well collectively isn't a good way to encourage us to work together and teach each other and stuff.
Overwhelmed!