Information Overload

Most people in my class are so overwhelmed it’s not even funny and we’re only 3 weeks into our second half of first year medicine. I predict that by the end of this semester there will be a handful of us having nervous breakdowns. I just hope I’m not one of them and if I’m one of the unfortunate ones who do, I’ll always have SBB’s melons to console me.

You see medical school isn’t like high school or even undergrad. Back then you could get away with learning whatever it is they tell you to learn and study the night before and still ace an exam (well maybe not so much in your senior year of undergraduate studies.. unless you sleep with your professor – that’s a different story). Medical school is a different kind of beast. Nobody tells you what to read and EVERYTHING is fair game for the exam. For example, let’s just say you’re learning about diabetes. You better know EVERYTHING about diabetes at the end of the day or you’re going to be royally screwed for the final exams. Sometimes we have to buy a couple of books for one subject because the professor decides to reference material from his lectures using different books or in some cases recent journal articles. I swear I must have 3 anatomy books alone due to the fact that my anatomy professor pulls pictures from different texts and uses synonyms wherever he can. It’s not fun. I hope to god he doesn’t throw Latin names of bones and muscles at us anytime soon and even if he did I’m just going to pretend I didn’t hear it. There, problem solved.

One of the best skills to have in medical school is the ability to pick out important information at a fast rate. There’s just so much information you have to know when you’re a medical student it’s impossible to know it all. So what do you do? You just fake it until you make it. That’s right. Just pretend you know what the hell you’re talking about half the time and people will think you’re a genius – although there’s a fine line between being a genius and a total nut-job. Another good way to get all the information is to divide it up amongst your friends. Hell, if you can find good friends who will go to boring lectures for you and then give you the notes afterwards, then you’re effing golden! Studying with somebody helps. It’s just nice to have somebody there to smack you upside your head when you’ve fallen asleep next to a cactus. Argh, let’s not relive that again.

As of right now I feel like I’m cramming all the time and the sad thing is that my first batch of exams aren’t even coming up for another couple of weeks. At least I’ve had years to perfect my cramming technique. It all started back in 2000 when I took my girlfriend for a ride in my shit brown 1988 Tempo and tried to cram my… oh my bad I got a little off track there…. Anyway, so yeah being a slacker back then learning to cram a semester worth of KNOWLEDGE into my brain in a short amount of time is sure helping me out in medical school right about now… that and dropping by my professor’s office for some “extra-curricular” stuff. If it wasn’t for the latter, I would be totally fucked right about now.