Third Semester Already?

Archway @ Mullet Bay

Hallelujah!! I’ve just completed 2/5ths of my time here in St. Maarten and I’m so tired my fingers can barely move across this keyboard. This tends to be the general consensus among my peers nearing the end of the semester – especially once final exams are completed. It looks like a scene right out of The Walking Dead around here.

I guess I never truly understood the phrase “medical school is a marathon, not a race”. I have to constantly remind myself of the enthusiasm I felt at the beginning and what I am working toward in the end. I’m tired, and I’m tired of being tired, but this is what I want more than anything in the world and I know it’s worth it.

Another thought that comes to mind often is “how could I have been so stupid?” This became apparent after the final exams yesterday afternoon. Usually, AUC has “bundled” exams, where tests are taken one after another with a 10 minute (total) break time that you can use as you wish. The final cumulative exams were set up a little differently: 1.5 hours/exam with 30 minutes in between each test. This gave us an opportunity to discuss questions and increase the tension through the roof as we became aware of what the general unanimity was.

Me: “Did you pick B for this question?”

Another student: “No I picked C”

Really smart student: “I picked C as well”

Me after thinking about it: “Why the hell did I pick B? C makes so much sense”

In undergrad I felt like a Rockstar. I had decent grades and was confident in my ability to perform well in medical school. This attitude dropped like a rock after first semester, when I made the transition from excelling to average. I’m proud of my current GPA, but now I’m surrounded by competitive geniuses that don’t seem to work as hard as I do for the same grades. Maybe it’s just my perspective, I don’t know.

Block IV exams went pretty smoothly, considering the massive amount of information we all had to learn. Molecular Cell Biology focused on Cancer, which was actually pretty neat and (obviously) very clinically relevant. I tend to forget that everything we learn needs to be applied to the human body at some point. For the MCB cumulative final exam, I cannot stress the Kaplan videos enough. They’re great at connecting the details you tend to forget about into one big picture.

The awesome thing about cardiovascular physiology is that it is entirely conceptual. If you understand the concept, you can answer the question. The unfortunate thing about cardiovascular physiology is the time constraint on exams. With MCB and Immunology, there are certain “buzzwords” you can find within the question stem that would lead you to the right answer, reducing the amount of time spent on each response. Physiology questions require a lot more thought and a thorough understanding of the mechanisms involved.

Example:

A 24-year old woman presents to the emergency department with severe diarrhea. When she is supine, her blood pressure is 90/60 mm Hg and her heart rate is 100 beats/min. When she is moved to a standing position, her heart rate further increases to 120 beats/min. Which of the following accounts for the further increase in heart rate upon standing?

1. Decreased total peripheral resistance
2. Increased vasoconstriction
3. Increased contractility
4. Increased afterload
5. Decreased venous return

Anyway, that’s all over now and I can emerge as a fresh faced 3^rd semester student! I cannot believe how quickly time has flown by. Right now, I’m just so happy to have the next couple weeks off. I desperately need to reset my mind and spend time with the people I care about. I get to meet my Godson, Bear for the first time in just a few days! During my time in school, I feel like I’ve missed so many important details in the lives of my loved ones and I’m looking forward to catching up!

Smiles 🙂

CG

First is the Worst, Second is the Best

Now that I have a moment, I suppose I’ll take some time to talk about second semester. Like my title suggests, I do actually like it better than first semester. When I arrived to St. Maarten in August, I was completely overwhelmed. I took advice from everyone (not necessarily the best idea in some cases) and was all over the map when it came to studying. I was desperate to perform well but ended up thrusting myself into “resource overload”. For instance, in Anatomy, some students had told me: “Oh, just read through BRS and disregard lecture notes, you’ll be fine”. After trying this method for a few days, it didn’t take long for me to realize that BRS was leaving out important clinical details that were mentioned in class and filling in the spaces with material I didn’t necessarily need to know. Eventually I found that every student must develop their own method of learning this insane amount of information (for some people, strictly reading BRS and skimming Netter’s Anatomy worked for them). For me personally, that involves showing up to class every day, feverishly typing out everything the professor says underneath the powerpoint slides and REVIEWING THE MATERIAL EVERY SINGLE DAY. Learning how to condense my notes was crucial. It took me too long to understand that I can’t possibly learn everything and needed to find a way to trace the mountains of data back to a single bullet point. Going to tutoring is great for this, because they present an outline of the major topics and I just fill in the relevant details from my class notes.

Anyway, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I have 4 classes this semester: MCB, Physiology, Immunology, and Biostatistics. Eventually I’ll have Introduction to Clinical Medicine II towards the end, but I’m not concerned about that right now.

Biostatistics started a couple weeks into the semester, resulting in MCB II being pushed back to 8:30, which is great because I love sleeping in! Its not that the material this semester is more difficult (so far), there is just a lot more of it. The first block exam of MCB II focused on biochemical pathways that I was already vaguely familiar with, thanks to my heavy biochemistry exposure in undergrad. I’m sure everyone has traced through the pathways of glycolysis a couple times in the years leading up to medical school. Obviously it gets a little more intense and you have to consider the clinical correlations associated with pathway disruption, but I actually found that more interesting. Mix in proteins and enzymes, TCA cycle and Oxidative phosphorylation, Gluconeogenesis, Pentose Shunt, Oxygen Toxicity and a dash of Ethanol Metabolism and you have yourself a steaming pile of test.

Physiology is also vaguely familiar as well. I’m catching a lot of similarities between Physiology and.. Physics actually. Here I was thinking: “Why in the world would they have physics on the MCAT?”. Turns out, the less mathematical portions are essential to a sound physiology understanding. Its a crazy world we live in.

I love immunology. Ever since I was a little girl, I would plop myself down in front of the discovery channel and look on in utter amazement as a virus took over mammalian cells, or a parasite ripped through a poor soul’s tissues. As I grew older, I discovered YouTube and a subsequent virtual library of doctors pulling hordes of roundworms out of a child’s intestines or botflies emerging out of skin. Viruses, bacteria, and parasites arouse an odd mix of incredulity and repugnance – just the idea that such a significant amount of damage can come from something you can barely see is mind boggling!

So that’s about it right now. I haven’t had enough exposure to Biostats to really talk about it, but it doesn’t seem so bad thus far. Anyway, I suppose its time for me to hit the ol’ dusty trail..

 

Smiles,

CG