Final Exams Provide a Reality Check

Aaron Singh -- It’s 6 am, and I’m sitting by myself on the top floor of my College library. The sun’s first rays are beginning to peek through the modern glass ceiling, and I’m still plowing through a series of Pharmacology lectures. In recent days I have earned the dubious honour of being the biggest customer at the College coffee vending machine, being too lazy to crawl all the way back to my room to make my own, and I’m now on a first-name basis with the College janitors who come in at 4 am to clean the library and prepare it for another working day. The librarian doesn’t bother cleaning up my books when she finds them anymore, knowing that wherever I’ve run off to, I’ll be back soon. Sigh.

So why am I working so hard, you ask? Well, firstly, it’s out of sheer panic. You see, ladies and gentlemen, just recently, about the same time I cracked my first textbook open a few days ago, I discovered an urgent truth that (I like to think) many medical students (just not the ones around here) probably discover around the time they sit down and begin hardcore revision (studying) for final exams:

I have forgotten how to revise.

No, really. All year I’ve been frolicking around on stage (which explains the death threats from my tutors) and making half-hearted attempts at studying (which explains the death threats from the lecturers who mark my essays). Now I’m getting death threats from my neurons, as I overload them in a last-ditch attempt to prepare for exams in 2 months.

So why this last-minute studying? Well, taking inspiration from Kendra’s last post, I could go on about how I signed up to be a white-coat-wearing, patient-seeing doctor hungry for clinical experience, and didn’t expect the hardcore academic training we get in our first three years.

But nope, the reality is simply that I'd lost myself for a while. I’d forgotten how hard I had to work to get into medical school in the first place, and how hard we all promised ourselves we’d work once we got here. But fortunately for me, a combination of caring tutors and overly competitive manic coursemates has opened my eyes while there’s still time. I may have to work overtime for a bit, but it’ll be worth it in the end; if I get my choice of third-year course, I may finally get some clinical exposure! But that’s a story for another post…in the meantime, I have a far bigger question looming on the horizon:

Black or white coffee?

April 10, 2007