Plodding along the increasingly tortuous road

Hey everyone

So I haven't posted much recently, and that's mainly been because of both things at home and things here (ie, the course). The title of this post probably seems a bit negative, but it absolutely captures the present completely. I'm currently having a bit of burn out with regards to lecture and home study style learning, and literally can't wait until we move into the hospitals next year. So in that respect, it's just one foot in front of the other until then (hence the 'plodding'). And the road continues to get more and more tortuous as we continue -- it might be smooth-ish right now, but as we get up to those dreaded end of year exams the shit is going to hit the fan in a major way. The end of year exams are on not only this semester, but the first semester as well. By then it's likely I'll have about 200000 words of notes in my onenote document. How are we meant to study all of that and retain any appreciable amount...it's just going to be very interesting. So at the moment, it's one foot in front of the other as the world around us and the path under our feet gets more and more treacherous.

Anyway! let's revive this post before it just becomes a general rant.

Probably a week ago now my laptop out of nowhere died. It would boot, but it would go to something called the 'aptio setup utility' or something like that, and wouldn't continue on to windows no matter what I did. I took all sorts of advice but to no avail, so the next day I went out with a friend and bought a new laptop. That may seem rash, but I simply don't have the time to spare to get the other one fixed. I have like 4 lectures a day on average! There's no way I want to catch up on that many lectures if the laptop would take like a month to come back. So I bought a laptop. And...an ipad mini. Why did I buy that?? It was a bit of an impulse purchase, but I've been thinking of getting a tablet for a while and there was just a better app store with the ipad. At the end of the day I want my phone to have excellent pre-installed applications because they're what I'm going to be using most of the time (eg, the keyboard), but on a tablet that's not as important. I'm going to be spending probably 95% of my tablet time in third party applications, and the argument is there that apple has better third party applications for some reason.

The ipad turned out to be one of my best impulse purchases ever! It's nice to have a big screen to enjoy everything on, but the main use for me has been facetime. Now, I know that's really lame. I scoffed at the facetime ads when they came out, and said to myself 'why didn't these people just use video calling'. But there's just something about it that makes it super easy to use...anyway, so my use of facetime has basically been exactly as apple portrayed in the ads -- facetiming my girlfriend (long distance relationships suck), and facetiming my family. I shudder to think that I've been so...predictable to an international corporation. But facetime is indeed cool, and I've greatly enjoyed using it.

The laptop I bought is a sony vaio pro 13, which it turns out is actually a very new laptop indeed. It's a pleasure to use, and is perfect (aside from the absence of an ethernet port. But, ethernet really needs to update the standard because the heads of the cables are now much too large for this day and age of measuring thickness of laptops in mm's).

Well this didn't end up being much of an interesting post, so I'm sorry about that. Just an update, I guess.

Catchas!

Circle

Neuro, and the study timetable

So we started neuroscience this week, and by all accounts of students from previous years it is by far the hardest block in first year. So we have all been looking at this block coming up with a large degree of apprehension...but for me it hasn't so far turned out to be so bad! I've done quite a bit of neuroscience and neuroanatomy in the past however so that's probably the only reason I'm going along ok. I actually am loving it so far -- I think what I like so much about neuroscience is that any deficit in it you can see in immediate ways in the patient. You have damage to your spinal cord? Ok, let me touch you at specific levels...oh, you can't feel below this line on your chest? Ok, the damage in your spinal cord is here. In other areas to investigate function you have to do all sorts of complex things like run lab tests, attach all sorts of weird wires to the patient, or look for the consequences of poor function in places that the patient is quite surprised you're looking at (like looking at the fingernails to get information about actually several different organs, a couple of which are in the gastrointestinal system!). In neuroscience the cause and effect relationship is immediate and plainly obvious, and that's one of the things that I find extremely interesting about it.

Also, I made a study timetable over the holidays (it actually took me the whole two weeks, that's how good I am at avoiding work) and it planned out my every 15 minutes between 6:45am and midnight every day of the week, monday to sunday. Call that ambitious? It was. The issue was always going to be how well I stuck to it, and I'm finding that with missing my girlfriend it's all the more difficult. Still I am finding that I'm doing more study, which is good I guess...I'm just being more liberal with my free time periods than I should teehee. I should get a handle on it soon -- I'm already finding my focus improving though.

Until next time! Sorry for the boring post!

Circle

[interesting title]

*static* Come in, come in, this is *static* to Earth, paging... anyone *static*


This is the mandatory first post. Hello there! I'm a student in Australia, currently 20 years old. I've got a keen interest in medicine -- that's what my undergrad degree's been about, and I'll maybe be starting in an MD course next year. What makes this blog different to all the other medical school student blogs out there? Nuthin! I'l try to write about things that are interesting enough that you might stick around though! Since I have about 15 years of education to go before I'm fully qualified I anticipate being able to share a great many interesting things in the years to come. One little thing I hope about starting this blog is that it won't just be another of those blogs you see that fades into obscurity due to neglect by either the author or audience...

Since life continues outside of studies too (sometimes that's hard to imagine!) this blog will be a place where I write about other things too. It won't be a day to day this-is-what-I-ate-for-breakfast ordeal, but will feature some things (time permitting).

So, here's to the years to come! Sleepless nights and life changing moments, coming right up.


Cheers,
Circle