My Caribbean Medical School Experience: FIRST EXAM RESULT, and other stuff.

When you last read I described my fun experiences that I had after my first exam called a "mini." I PASSED. I am happy to say that I have retained some amount of information from studying these long hours. So where do I go from here? I had to stop and analyze what I did right, and more importantly what did I do wrong? Let's start with the "rights". 1) I woke up every morning, ate a good breakfast and went to class. 2) I studied the lectures multiple times 3) I went to bed around midnight to ensure I would have enough rest to wake up at 7am the next day and have adequate rest to repeat the process. Now for the wrongs: 1) I spent too much time pre-reading the lectures, and taking pre-notes. 2) drinking the water straight from the tap.-rookie mistake. 3) walked alone at night thinking I was safe.

Explanations:

Let me put this in layman's terms. I feel like the person that joined the gym after the New Year. I made the resolution to get fit, go for a week and then completely forget I even have a gym membership. You know these people. Trust me.

Here's my issue. This week, the"rights" rarely happened. My sleep was poor, I took lots of naps, my attention span was shot, caffeine stopped working, and I was overall felt like I got hit by a bus. It was not for a lack of motivation, because everyone here has that. But rather just being burnt out and not realizing that one night of staying up late (being productive of course), can domino effect the rest of the week. Lesson learned.

As for the "wrongs," I learned my lesson's AND QUICK. I completely changed my approach to studying after day 3, abandoning all prior techniques and adopting the rewrite until you know it technique (just like Bart Simpson at the beginning of every episode of the Simpson's) Click the link if you're curious. :-)

Details in med school are everything. If a professor says, "understand this from conceptual point of view", it means know this backwards, frontwards, inside-out, in mandarin Chinese and smoke signals. There are no shortcuts (besides mnemonics) here. The second lesson about the water was easily learned from the Hershey squirts (diarrhea). (I've also learned about several reasons why diarrhea happens in regards to epithelia cells in the gut, but I'll spare you). So bottled water it is. Also! -side note- We had an "emergency" water crisis here which I secretly think is a political move from the company that has a monopoly on the bottled water industry on the island, but once again I'll spare you.
And finally the third "wrong" is regarding walking alone at night... I did this several times before one of my classmates got mugged and lost all of his/her electronics, not to mention is probably distraught in other ways (trying to keep the identity safe). The night it happened I couldn't sleep out of sheer anger. So, lesson learned the easy way, unfortunately at someone else's expense. (Many people from the community came together and helped the individual out).

So here I sit, with an open coconut, in a study hall where the monthly movie is about to start (Argo). I can finally relax and have some real life fun. (Aside from talking to my family and dearest Sarah on Skype of course)

Another aside, SKYPE!!! I am calling you out. I appreciate the idea for your service, but what I do not appreciate is the hypertension associated with trying to connect a call a dozen times only for it to cut out after 3 seconds just to repeat the process. In reality I have no reason to complain because I'm not paying for it, but c'mon man! All of these issues have led to this mosaic of skype related issues seen below (Copyright Sarah 2013)

This weekend I will be attempting to take on my new list of "wrongs" I encountered this week. And at the top of the list is 1) DO NOT GET BEHIND.

So right after the movie, a bottle of diet coke and it's right back to business.

Here is the fun part of the blog: