11/24/06

More personal now...I'm three days out from my last round of exams. I'm starting to feel human again, but not quite. I remember thinking on the 16th, the day of exams, that this is an awful, ugly experience. I ran into Stewart Hill, a classmate who was in Lusaka this Summer, and his indefatigable spirit was alive and well while I was miring in my dark, unshaven, hellacious attitude of our current exams. Stewart seemed surprised, in a good way, at my response to his "How are you?"

"I'm not happy," I said. Not happy, was I. I studied, but I think that my classmates know some secret to which I am not privy. They seem to know what to study, whileas I seem to study my ass off and spin my wheels.

As is customary, I was more interested in what I was studying than in getting good marks. Not an excuse, just a commentary on my uncanny knack for getting lost in the details, and forgetting that I need to hit a minimum requirement for passing...I am honored and privileged, truly, to be named among my classmates, like Stew-dog, who seem to effortlessly get through these hurdles. I work hard, but I believe that others make bigger efforts...and they seem to make these efforts more effortlessly. Maybe it's because I am older, but I hate to think that I have lost a step, on the basketball court as much as in the classroom. It may be true, but hell if I'm going to admit it.

Again I studied nearly all night, in addition to the week's worth of nights before that. I took a nap between 1 and 3 am on the night before the exams. I woke at the fulcrum of the day to the alarm on my cell phone. I had gone through a two-inch stack of flash cards for pharmacology, and earlier in the week I had gone through a similar, slightly shorter stack for Pathology. Microbiology covered a great deal that pathology covered, so I discounted studying for that course, to my detriment, grade-wise.

I think I've grown fatigued, in general, of studying. Strange thought, that is, to me. Studying...sometimes I can sit down and think that I could do this forever. It's simple in some respects. You read, you write your notes, you look at illustrative images, you listen to lectures, and it's meant to make sense. And it does make sense.

If you're good at balancing your time, you repeat this for all of the subject matter, so that the idea of "the more times you see it" plays to your benefit. Love the stuff, but damn there's a lot to learn.

Ironically, I think that I learned more in Pharmacology than any other course. I would have thought that infectious diseases or microbiology would have provided the most motivation for me, but pharm carried me strongest. I learned that rote memorization is the key, and once I accepted that fact, which is anathema to my philosophy for learning - I hate memorizing just for the sake of memorizing - then I got it, and was able to successfully perform in Pharm. But ugh, with the other courses, it was not fun.

All of this makes me respect my classmates more and more. These guys and gals continue to excel in the face of the same huge amounts of information that I am faced with, but they all seem to do it more alacrity and ease than I do. Kudos to them, for their aptitude (most likely), and/or for their ability to hide the stress associated with hammering this knowledge into their noggins. My humble kudos.