Attention med students!

Even though I'm in medical school in Europe, there is a lot of similarity in the course curriculum when I compare to Canadian medical schools and US medical schools. The main difference is that our program is spread out over 6 years and you can start right out of high school.

One of those courses is Anatomy. And in our program, it's the single most important course we take during medical school because if you fail anatomy, you fail the first year of medical school even if you've passed every other course. They use the course to weed people out (a lot of people do end up dropping out when they fail). If you've read this blog, you'd know how stressed out I was by this course (even though I loved it)! I've never felt a greater relief in my life than when I found out I passed.

Recently two of my classmates (and friends!) started a wonderful Facebook and Instagram page, called AnatomyWithA&D, with the goal of helping students studying anatomy in a fun way. It's a great combo of informative, academic posts and practical applications of anatomy, tips on how to best study and much more. And the two founders know what they are talking about - they had the highest marks in anatomy in my year and they were selected to represent our program at a national anatomy competition, called the Golden Scapula.

Anyway, I highly, highly recommend you check them out and follow!

You can find them on Instagram here and on Facebook here. Go and check them out!

To write or not to write....

The MCAT. My nemesis.

I've been studying pretty hard for the past two weeks and honestly, things are not looking good. At all. In fact, I had a mini break down the other day because I realized I was falling pretty behind in my schedule and yet still couldn't figure out how to do those projectile motion physics problems. I just kept getting them wrong and all I could think about was how the prep course physics instructor kept reminding us that its a majorly important concept for the MCAT and serves as a foundation for future topics.

I realized how much I still have to learn, not just review and honestly, I know I can't learn it all before the exam. Its physically impossible.

Jordan thinks that I should just not write in April and post-pone it till August and I'm strongly leaning in that direction. But on the other hand, I have already paid for the test and won't get a full refund if I cancel- so I'm also leaning towards just writing it and basically treating it as a trial run. Who knows, I might get lucky (though that's wishful thinking - I think the same thing each time I buy a lottery ticket and so far, the most I've won was $120). I don't think it would be a wasted experience and I think it will keep me more focused to still study and not lose steam by having to write it in 4 weeks. But I've pretty much come to terms with the fact that I'm going to have to rewrite the goddamned thing. And that sucks.

I'm just realizing how major of an undertaking I've taken upon myself and however optimistic I was about doing it all in a year, its just not possible. I've had to reassess some of my goals. Like the Life Science pre-requisites for one university that I was planning on taking. I still have 1.5 full-time course equivalents to go and if I need to re-write the MCAT, there is no way that I'll be able to do them. So I may actually just end up NOT applying to the one university that I wanted to go to the most. But its that, or NONE, because if my MCAT sucks, I have no chances anywhere.

In any case, please send out good vibes my way on April 28th. Cause I'm desperately going to need them.

Whoa there horsey!

Ok, so I may have been a bit too optimistic when I planned my study schedule. I was looking at my course outline for the Biology course and even though the recommendations were to do a chapter a week, I thought, hell I can do a chapter a day AND throw in some labs and assignments.

To be fair, I had started reading my text book while I was still working so that was obviously hard to do a lot of. But since Monday was my first day not working, I thought, WOW I have SOOO much time, OBVIOUSLY I'll be able to do this hardcore. And I really thought I could. Except I also actually still have all the responsibilities of wife and mother on my plate so I can't just focus on my courses. Not to mention I have a ton of administrative things to do related to this process: signing up for my MCAT course, calling an exam proctoring center to make sure they would be able to proctor my mid-term, registering for my mid-term...

And the course text book isn't exactly a Marian Keyes novel (I love her books by the way). I mean, its interesting for sure and I like learning (or rather re-learning) this stuff. But 10-15 pages of bio does take a while, especially when one actually wants to understand the words that they are reading.

But today has been a bit frustrating. I had decided to write up a lab report on the first lab I did. I have to submit two lab reports on two of the seven labs I have to do as part of this course and thought, why not get one out of the way? The lab was easy and it was fresh in my head. But since its been a decade (I chose decade instead of 10 years to highlight how long ago this was) since I've written a lab report, I wasn't quite sure where to start. Besides I'd never done one at the university level before. So something that I thought would take an hour or two max has turned into over four hours. Its done though, and submitted. Now I just hope the grade on it will reflect the time I spent on it!

I do want to get as good grades on these courses as possible. Even though I know that for U of T they won't factor it into my GPA, they will for McMaster. This would be such a good opportunity to  boost my average.

Anyway, back to studying. Chapter 4 - Enzymes isn't going to read itself.