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So the exam today went dreadfully. The only thing that I know, is that I don’t know anything.

Loads of people were coming out of the exam saying that they’d done badly and won’t have passed many questions (the pass requirement for our exams is based on how many questions you pass, rather than your overall percentage), but you know that really they’ll have done really well. When I say it though, I mean it. There were things on the paper that I don’t even recall ever learning about, let alone have revised and could answer questions on them! All of the topics which I’m confident on didn’t come up, not one. Additionally, my brain was so fuzzy that I struggled coming up with basic information (such as what the uterus was called…). All in all, unless a miracle occurs and I get everything right in tomorrow’s paper (which lets face it, is highly unlikely), I’m going to be doing re-sits.

The thing is though, at this point I’m questioning if I’ll even be able to pass re-sits, even with the extra few weeks of revision time. I work hard but I just don’t seem to be able to retain the amount of information required. Not everyone’s cut out for medicine, and maybe I’m one of them? Throughout high school I was that annoying person who got close to 100% without having to really work for it, but since then I’ve slowly been losing my work ability. Things used to come really easilyy to me, but now I’ll work my butt off and still only be mediocre. Maybe I’m just dumbing down as I’m aging, or maybe it’s just that phenomenon of bringing together all these smart, type A personalities at med school, and unfortunately not everyone can be the best, someone has to be at the bottom of the pile.

Throughout my life my family haven’t put deliberate “you must do well or we’ll disown you” pressure on me, but a different type of pressure; the “you’re the smart one in the family, you work hard so we know you’ll do well’ pressure. The type of pressure that is worse because they’re just being nice but they’ve got such high expectations of you that to disappoint them would be worse than failing itself. Even my boyfriend’s the same. I love them, but I wish they’d just say “we understand that this is really hard and it won’t be the end of the world if you don’t succeed”. Everyone’s so proud of me going to med school, that to flunk out now would be horrible, but if I’m struggling at this stage, how will I make it over the next 3 years?

I’m sorry for this abundance of self-pity. As you can probably tell, I’m feeling pretty deflated after this morning’s exam and don’t really feel as though I can talk to anyone in real life about it. Hopefully tomorrow's exam won’t be quite so disastrous and then I can just put them out of my head and work towards OSCEs and resits.

Yet more revision

It's a lovely day, neighbours are having bbq's and multiple facebook updates have popped up showing friends out enjoying the sun, and so to at least try to enjoy some of the sun (and to escape my neighbour's dreadful singing) I revised in our back garden for a few hours this morning. It was very enjoyable, and I actually got quite a bit done, but unfortunately, our garden is north facing, so the garden's now totally in the shade, despite only being 3pm :(.

Garden revision (photo taken by me)

I think that I've finally found a way of revising Medicine which works well for me (I wish I could have figured this out sooner, given that it's only 3 days until my first exam, but better late than never right?). It's nothing special, I just type up condensed notes (still 30-50 pages per module....), then print them out and read over them a million times and highlight/memorise off by heart the most important bits. Previously I've tried flash cards, spider diagrams, revising my notes off the computer and other things, but this method seems to be by far the best. I don't know why I can learn far better when my notes are printed out rather than off the computer screen, but that's the way it is! Given that my revision up until recently hasn't been very effective I won't be surprised (I'll still be upset, but not surprised) if I fail the first take of the exams, but hopefully I'll be well prepared for the resists. I'm still going to try my very best to pass the exams on the first try though.

Good luck to everyone else working towards exams at the moment!

Losing My Mind

Ways in which revision ruins your life:

• Becoming fat. I even have fat feet as I discovered today.
• Diagnosing randomers in the street with conditions that I’ve been revising about recently (and then becoming really concerned for them in case they do actually have (highly unlikely) whatever it is you think they do, but they don’t know about it and then they might become really ill).
• Not caring about my physical appearance and living in the same tracksuit bottoms/PJs for a month.
• Taking half an hour out of revision time to help do the washing up seems like the most unreasonable thing ever and will the sole cause of me failing my exams, but watching an hour of Grand Designs during my “revision break” is fine.
• Spurting out medical information whenever my boyfriend/the tv/bus adverts/pretty much any outside stimulus mentions anything vaguely medically related and then getting really cross when I can’t remember a key bit of information (eg. specific blood test) about whatever it is I’m shouting about. This then equals a cross boyfriend because trying to remember medicine means that I’m not paying attention to what he’s saying or else I’m talking over the tv programme we’re watching.
• Becoming unreasonably aggravated and obsessive over the slightest noises disturbing your revision – how dare your neighbour do their washing at 11am on a weekday! How can they not prioritise your learning time over everything else?
• Developing bi-polar disorder - complete and utter stress one moment about not knowing anything at all and despair at never being able to learn even a third of the never ending pile of revision notes to a lackadaisical attitude towards the whole thing, believing that I’ll be fine, I’ve done lots of revision and I’m sure I’ll have that amazing revision day tomorrow where I’ll manage to revise half of the material for the exam and all of the knowledge will magically fall into my brain…

Update

Hi,

My apologies for not updating in a while. Time’s just ran away from me recently! Not too much has been happening lately though. We had a few weeks off for Easter which was nice. I didn’t do too much, just a bit of revision and some Pharmacy shifts. This is the last week of our term for this year (!), so we’re mostly just having revision/review lectures, rather than learning new material. This first year of university has gone so so fast!  My first exam is in just over 3 weeks time. Most of my revision notes are up to date, but I still have a lot of learning to do. I haven’t got the exam stress yet, but I’m sure it’ll hit soon. I really really hope that I manage to pass these exams ok.

We had some fresh lower limb specimens to learn from the other day. I didn’t really enjoy the session too much because of a few reasons. The specimens looked as though they came from elderly people, which made me think of my grandparents which was a bit disturbing. I also don’t find that I personally learn very well from plastinations/specimens, I learn better from sitting down and just reading over everything by myself. Additionally, because the room is quite crowded I can’t properly hear the demonstrator or see the specimen half of the time. When I came home after this session though, my boyfriend’s response when I told him that we’d had fresh specimens was “Aw, isn’t that sweet that someone’s last wish was that you’d learn lots from their body”. This made me think differently about the session, and feel a bit guilty that I’d complained a little bit and hadn’t found it that useful.

I’ve been enjoying the nice weather we’ve been having the last few days, though it does make it harder to sit down and revise! There’s always things going on when the weather’s nice and my boyfriend doesn’t always understand that sometimes I have to be boring and stay at home and work instead of going out and having fun.