Happy Hampster in a Cage

So the fresh prep went well! I do have 3 picture, they'll be up in a bit. I'm working on a post, along the lines of "How to write a paper in One and a Half Days." All in all, it's been a fun week or so.

I handed in a 15 page paper, and got it back. A-. I felt pretty good about that, considering I was expecting a B- on it. It was alright content wise, but I was worried for my MLA citations and references. However, he's not the kind of prof who cares much about frills (he did his masters in Logic), and so he was more looking at what I was saying. He knew if I was telling the truth or not because he knew alot about the topic.

I just handed in another paper, 5 pages, to my linguistic teacher. She then told us that the person who had handed in their paper early handed in the "second worst paper" she has ever marked "in all ther 13 years of teaching." Ouch. Way to put a hole in the pit of 30 people's stomachs, all at once. I wrote that paper in a day, so we'll see how it does.

Other than that, the worst of academia is over for the semester, disregarding finals. One lab test, 20%, and one power point presentation, 10 minutes, 5 or 7 %, something like that. Then finals.

For those who don't know, my summer is going to be taken up by school as well. I'm taking Biochemistry 300A from May until August. I'm also studying for the MCAT, which I will take in late August, by myself.

I could take the Kaplan course, here in Victoria, which preps you for the MCAT test. But I hear the results are similar whether you take the course or not, so long as you can keep yourself on track with your studying. I've bought a couple prep books and I'll work diligently through those. Then it's just one course in september in terms of prerequisites, and thats it. I'm set to apply for med school.

In the meantime I'm volunteering. I'm an on-call support worker for women who are victims of sexual assault. I teach human anatomy in a lab here on campus (that one is technically a work-study), and I volunteer at the foodbank on campus as well. Racking up hours. Serving my community. I do it because it's worthwhile work, and I do it because I need to be do more worthwhile work: becoming a doctor. Sometimes it just feels like one big push to the finish line. But I'm happy I'm doing it.

Fresh Prep Today!

Today is another fresh prep in the Anatomy Lab! For those of you who don't know, I'm a lab assistant for a course here at Uvic, PE 141, aka Human Anatomy. While we can't dissect human flesh for our learning purposes (I'll have have to wait until April for that, when the LA's get to see a human cadaver dissection. NEATO!), we can dissect Mr.Piggy over there to illustrate a few points about the heart and lungs. Why a pig you ask? Well if you're a fan of CSI Las Vegas, you'll know that Grissom always does his crime scene simulations on pigs. About half the time someone asks him why a pig, and he, in his Grissom-wisdom says "because Pigs are the most like humans out of all the animals." Which is mostly true. I mean, we used to use their insulin before we could make it synthetically, and their laryngx (voice box) and internal organs are organized about the same, approximately the right size and roughly the same shape. Besides, monkeys are hairy and in short supply, comparatively.


Cool things to note:

1) The surface area in your lungs, if you laid it all flat, would cover half of a standard tennis court.
2) Your heart pumps enough blood to cover that in 1.5 second, and shunts it all OFF the court-sized area in a similar amount of time.
3) You breathe about 20,000 times a day, 7.3 million times a year
4) The weight of blood circled through your lungs each DAY is approximately 8 tonnes.

Whoa. I'll try and get someone to take pictures :)

100 meter sprint

Why is it that more people don't make goals? I'm a goal person. Not obsessively or in a confining way or anything. I just like to know where I'm headed, you know? What all these late nights with my trusty tablet and stacks of books are counting for.

Goals for today, goals for tomorrow, goals for 5 years from now... I think without them I'd feel alot like a boat with no anchor or sails, drifting around and hoping to wash up on some favourable island. I don't know how people do it. People without concrete aspirations. It's not necessarily a bad thing to not be one of those goal-planner, list-maker kind of people, it's just something I don't think I could not do. That list of 100 things (first post of this blog, entitled "The Challenge") is like looking up at a mountain. But the thing is it's a mountain that, because I've laid it all out, I know the face of. I can see where all my footholds are. I can see what peaks I'm going to have to tackle first. So in the end I know, like everything else, it's not going to be nearly as hard as it looks.

Take today as an example. Here are my goals for the day:
- Call the fertility clinic and ask them abount treatment costs, etc, for my ethics paper
- Go to school for my ecology class (take notes that reflect "getting it," if not every single detail)
- Eat a big lunch so I can...
- Head to the library and write at least 2 more pages of my ethics paper, and clear up the gobbledy-gook of the 6 pages I have so far
- Edit my genetics lab partner's paper a little bit more
- Dinner
- Review Human Anatomy for my study period tomorrow night.

And that, if all goes well, will be my day. Looks like alot of stuff, but with 24 hours in a day, and a set of hours to do within it, it's more than reasonable. I think. I've been running myself ragged lately with deadlines. It's March! March should be this nice, gentle push towards finals, and instead it's like a hundred meter sprint. My immune system is not happy, and neither is my skin. I have this nice pompei-esque zit right between my eyes... last time I checked being a cyclops was never sexy. Add that to laryngitis which is giving way to a hacking cough. Yep, I'm gonna be THAT girl in the library. I have no choice though, shit isn't going to get done if I don't go there.

On another note, goal oriented again, it seems I'm going to have to spend most of my summer here instead of going back home to the family. One of my (very difficult) pre-requisites is being offered in the summer, and if I can take it then and not have the pressure of 3 other courses, I have to. The only lame thing is it's five days a week, but only one hour a day. 50 minutes. Out of my 24 hour day, I have to stay here because 50 minutes of it is Biochem 300A. Blah. I'll also be studying for my MCAT, which reminds me, I still need to register to take it. I'm thinking end of August should give me enough time to prepare. But yeah, looks like I'm spending a summer here. At least the free time will give me time to train for TKD on my own. In the summer. When it's not so cold like now. Anyways, off to the races!

Start your engines

With so many goals and so little time, you need a game plan. I need a game plan. I'm currently managing alot of things right now. I'm a full time student at my University, majoring in Biology, 3rd year. I'm currently taking Genetics, Ecology, Biomedical Ethics and Developmental Psycholinguistics. My grade's aren;t as stellar as I would like them to be (B to A- right now), but alot of that it likely due to the fact that it's my first year out of the house, in another city, more or less on my own. I live with my best friend from my old University, so I've got got built in hermit-protection...

Ok, so, game plan. Out of those 100 goals, there are a select few which can be worked on all the time, continually, no matter what the rest of my life is like. There are also some goals which I am working on by default. For example, striving to get As is something I'm working on all the time. As is becoming a doctor. That's the big goal right now, the forefront long term goal. All the reading goals (read the dictionary, read the encyclopaedia, read 500 books, be familiar with the works of blah blah blah, etc) can be worked on continually, and are worked on continually, because I've always got a book. And if blogs counted, I'd be a quarter of the way there, but I've made them not count on purpose. They're not as "finishable" as books. I don't get to cross them off a list. And this is all about lists, after all. Publish at least 5 essays... that one's a doozy. It's a time thing is what I'm finding here. I look at this and a part of me wants to start doing everything all at once. But aside from the one's I'm always working on (reading, music, etc), I think I need to pick one. Just one, MAYBE 2, and attack that/those. Otherwise I think this list is going to gobble me up.

And I intend to gobble it. :)

So I think the As are what it will be. That's what I'm craving. Big, fat As at the end of the semester. There's my first short term goal to tackle. Time to 'release the hounds'