Week 2 in Med School

 What were your ups? Your Downs and everything in between this week?

How did you spend your days and What are some fun things you did this week?

This is a recollection of what happened in my 2nd Week of Med School.

Monday:

New start of the week! Mondays are great, usually because it is the start of a fresh week. Despite the universe telling me that Sunday is actually considered Day 1, I believe the latter. Why so? 

I still take extended breaks on Sundays and my work and set schedules starts officially on Mondays. I have classes on Mondays. Hence Day 1 of ANY week are Mondays.

Same Schedule as the Previous week, Chinese Classes is on my TOP priorities today. It is only Lesson 4, and my oh my, it is getting trickier and harder. I have been using ANKI to get through memorising all the characters and pinyins.... However I am still struggling with physically writing each character by memory. I sense another method in place would have to be used here to actually get me used to it and writing it off by memory. Classes were productive and engaging as per usual. I enjoyed that our teacher decided to launch a video call in the second part of the lecture to engage with us ONLINE LEARNERS on how to pronounce some of the phonetics. 

The rest of my Afternoon, our Class 2 (oh,  I hadn't mentioned this before, but we were all divided into 3 groups from our 100+ cohort) had a video call meeting. 

        The AGENDA:- 

1. Get to know EVERYONE or MOST in Class 2 (yes, we had our video cams on)

2. Self introduction from everyone and an Official meet and greet with our Class Mentor

3. Elections and Voting for the Class Representative and Assistant Class Representative

It was a great session! ALL the Candidates were so good and it was actually a challenge and I could feel that all candidates were very interested and had such strong values and leadership skills! I felt intimidated by all (Yes, I too was running for the role). EVERYONE had presented such strong points, that it could have gone any other way, and we would have known Class 2 would have still be in good hands. 

It was a very nice day Monday. Lots happen and this one is defs for the memories and books!

Tuesday

Its Official. I HATE TUESDAYS. 

This is the worst schedule i have in the days of the week! Physics and then Chinese. 

Chinese I 💓 you, You are great so far and I feel I am actually learning and grasping hold of things more. Physics. you belong in a certain hellhole. 

Physics Lesson 2: We caught up on lecture 1 (mind you we hadnt finished it previously due to technical errors), but man we had to review it for 1.5 hours. RIP my mental existence. And after that gruelling 1.5 hours we jumped straight to Lecture 2. It was a challenge. 

   Side note: I like to Preview my lectures before going into lecture. And significantly, I had done a preview on the topics that would be covered in lecture 1 and 2 using the good ol' Khan Academy for references and to get hold of a strong footing. You see, I went in feeling like I actually knew my 💩, and was confident in what we would be covering. HOWEVER, I came out feeling like i went through 10x of HELL and emerged with only a little hope left. 👀

Verdict: DO I ACTUALLY KNOW MY SHIT? or DID the lecturer just confused the crap out of me...?

CHINESE lesson 5:

"On your TRONclass app, open the exam icon." 

I have test anxiety. I am sure that this is a topic that it is not discussed often. I always had the lingering fear of 'I won't do well, and I am going to screw it up" in exams. It is just a thing, and sometimes it does get the better of me. 

But, luckily she was just showing us that this is a test run on how the quizzes would be like next Monday. Which means, I need to revise all these Chinese Characters and Pinyin and Tone markers over the weekend and get good! 

This lesson was significantly harder than the rest. WE had to learn 12 new characters, and a few are quite the complicated ones and MY OH MY, it might have just been we had a long morning (Screw u Physics) but I was not actually able to physically catch up on the material during class. It was VERY challenging. 

Overall: 10/10 tiring day. Mental tolerance end of day = BIG FAT ZERO. 

Wednesday

Maths was actual hell. I take back saying Physics was Hell. Maths make Physics look like a piece of cake now. 

I have reasoned with myself that self-learning and reading the entire Physics Concept, I can actually understand and grasp it. Maths.... No matter what it is, its like in one ear out the other. 

Our Lecturer was going road-runner speed. His methods were insane to catch up and follow. Here's how he lectured us:

    Formula (blah blah a to power r blah blah...)

    Example 

    (OKAY?? Next!)

    Formula

    Example

    (Okay? Good? Next!)

Absorption of material= Zero

Understanding the application of formulas = ZERO

Just one word. UGH.

And he ended the class with saying 2 things that got my eye twitching. 

1. Its just BASICS. You'all should already know these

2. The real LEARNING starts next lesson

Thursday

        " This Sunday 9/27. We will have Math class, due to the upcoming National Day Holidays as replacement classes."

And here, I thought I actually had Sundays off. A full day to recuperate and relax. (바보처름..)

What a great morning already....

Biology Class:

It was alright. Lecturer read of the PPT as his script but it was a simple and fair go through of the topics. The one slide that made me feel like "I am a medical student." was the slide on Alzheimers, Parkinsons and Huntingtons. This is where he gave a sneak peek of the pathophysiology of what these 3 diseases have in common on where things go wrong. 

Overall, it was an OKAY class.

Friday:

Oh my last day of the week??! SIKE! 

We still have got Sunday's Maths replacement classes. I do dread that. My Sunday is ruined.

But today we had Chinese classes again! Same old stuff, but just got told we have an quiz Once every 5 lessons. Which means I have one next week. Gonna be grinding all those characters over the weekend whilst catching up on Maths and Physics.....

Week 2 huh? 👀

Oh wells. This is what I had signed up for.