Only 24 hours
Some days I wonder why there are only 24 hours in a day.
I think I'm a poor time manager, I spend a lot more time worrying about doing something than actually doing it in one go.
This is not a rant. There's a good reason why I feel like this.
I have a lot more going on this year than I did last year - and last year was not a breeze.
This semester I have truckloads of neurology and next semester we study beautiful things like immunology, microbiology and pathology (disease). My friends who are in their fourth or fifth years have remarked (on more than one occasion) that second year is lot more difficult, especially the neurology. I find the neuro interesting but there's that feeling of crude incompleteness in my head right now; I feel like I don't fully understand everything that we've been taught so far (and it's only been a dozen lectures).
This year I'm also the social secretary of our university's Desi Society. I know I keep saying this but it's true: they picked the most anti-social person to be social sec. Honestly.. It's not that much work but I've suddenly got my hands full with the Fresher's Gig coming up in a week's time.
I've also joined the Surgical Society in an attempt to set the scene for wielding scalpels and artery clamps in the not-so-near future (erm, six years from now, at least). They're having their first meeting next Tuesday and I'm hoping to get picked to be a representative for my year so I'll have something glamorous and surgery-related to put on my résumé.
And to put the whipped cream on the frappuccino that is my life, I've become a "student associate" on the Student Associate Scheme (applause). Let me explain. This past May, I applied for a job that would start in October (i.e., this month). It's part of a scheme run by Newcastle and Northumbria Universities that makes teachers out of university students and recruits them to schools for a few days so that the university students can get some experience of teaching, organizing, working with children in an academic environment and all that jazz. Well I got interviewed for the job in June, a day before I left for Dubai. A week later they told me they wanted a pretty thing like myself for the job (well that's not exactly what they said, but you know..) And today I had the first training session. It was four hours long. One-sixth of my day I spent in that lecture theater with about 70 other students, taking it all in. It wasn't such a task, I mean, there were free sandwiches and all.
But it's just the idea of having to divide my time carefully that's really worrying me. I actually don't know how I'm going to juggle these four things at once. Desi Soc and Surgical Society aren't gonna be big problems. It's dividing time between second year (what with its background reading, patient study¹ and student selected component²) and the Student Associate thing that I find daunting.
I do have the option of doing the Student Associate Scheme in June, after my second year finals.. but somehow I feel it'll be nice to burden myself during the academic year.
Will it be a difficult year? I reckon it will be if I don't learn to manage time well.
¹The Patient Study is an assignment we do in second year, in which we chat with a person with a chronic illness about their life and experience with the disease and then write a biopsychosocial saga about it. BTW, 'biopsychosocial' is just a word that our Medicine in the Community lecturer came up with.
² The Student Selected Component is a critical evaluation of a bunch of papers from medical journals - the papers are about the success of some new treatment or surgical procedure. This assignment is supposed to be a real brain-chewer.
I think I'm a poor time manager, I spend a lot more time worrying about doing something than actually doing it in one go.
This is not a rant. There's a good reason why I feel like this.
I have a lot more going on this year than I did last year - and last year was not a breeze.
This semester I have truckloads of neurology and next semester we study beautiful things like immunology, microbiology and pathology (disease). My friends who are in their fourth or fifth years have remarked (on more than one occasion) that second year is lot more difficult, especially the neurology. I find the neuro interesting but there's that feeling of crude incompleteness in my head right now; I feel like I don't fully understand everything that we've been taught so far (and it's only been a dozen lectures).
This year I'm also the social secretary of our university's Desi Society. I know I keep saying this but it's true: they picked the most anti-social person to be social sec. Honestly.. It's not that much work but I've suddenly got my hands full with the Fresher's Gig coming up in a week's time.
I've also joined the Surgical Society in an attempt to set the scene for wielding scalpels and artery clamps in the not-so-near future (erm, six years from now, at least). They're having their first meeting next Tuesday and I'm hoping to get picked to be a representative for my year so I'll have something glamorous and surgery-related to put on my résumé.
And to put the whipped cream on the frappuccino that is my life, I've become a "student associate" on the Student Associate Scheme (applause). Let me explain. This past May, I applied for a job that would start in October (i.e., this month). It's part of a scheme run by Newcastle and Northumbria Universities that makes teachers out of university students and recruits them to schools for a few days so that the university students can get some experience of teaching, organizing, working with children in an academic environment and all that jazz. Well I got interviewed for the job in June, a day before I left for Dubai. A week later they told me they wanted a pretty thing like myself for the job (well that's not exactly what they said, but you know..) And today I had the first training session. It was four hours long. One-sixth of my day I spent in that lecture theater with about 70 other students, taking it all in. It wasn't such a task, I mean, there were free sandwiches and all.
But it's just the idea of having to divide my time carefully that's really worrying me. I actually don't know how I'm going to juggle these four things at once. Desi Soc and Surgical Society aren't gonna be big problems. It's dividing time between second year (what with its background reading, patient study¹ and student selected component²) and the Student Associate thing that I find daunting.
I do have the option of doing the Student Associate Scheme in June, after my second year finals.. but somehow I feel it'll be nice to burden myself during the academic year.
Will it be a difficult year? I reckon it will be if I don't learn to manage time well.
¹The Patient Study is an assignment we do in second year, in which we chat with a person with a chronic illness about their life and experience with the disease and then write a biopsychosocial saga about it. BTW, 'biopsychosocial' is just a word that our Medicine in the Community lecturer came up with.
² The Student Selected Component is a critical evaluation of a bunch of papers from medical journals - the papers are about the success of some new treatment or surgical procedure. This assignment is supposed to be a real brain-chewer.