Two things crossed off my list!

One, number 44, "Learn the Workings of Your Average Pipe Bomb," was completed a few days ago with the help of my dad, who apparently made them as a kid horsing around with friends. WAY simpler than I thought. KABOOM!

Next, number 82, "Go to the Opera in a Gown". DONE. This was kindly done by my good friend Conrad, who surprised me with the plan. We went this evening, and saw "Regina" (Pronounced Rejeena, apparently). It was in English, which was handy. The plot generally revolved around Regina Gibbens, a money hungry Southern belle with two equally grasping brothers. They try to strike it rich by investing with a bigshot, but they get finicky over who gets to put in what share... there's more involving a marriage between first cousins, Regina's ailing husband Horace, and the frequent bottle tipping of poor Aunt Birdie, but long story short, it was pretty enjoyable. The women were more impressive than the men, vocally. But my GOD were they impressive. I mean they just filled up the theatre, so clear and so strong... it was truly awesome. AND I got to wear a gown! Given, it was my prom gown, but I thought it looked better on me tonight than it did then. In the picture I'll probably put up with this, though, I don't even really look lik me. My face looks funny. But it's my only proof, and so up it must go, I suppose. I felt really fancy. Everyone was looking. I mean, people were generally dressed up but not GOWN dressed up. It was fun. A woman complimented me on my dress, and I felt pretty special. It was a good, good time.

2 down, just like that. Only 98 left to get at :)

The End of Third Year

It feels like only yesterday I was standing at a podium in front of hundreds of people, giving a speech at the end of my Senior year. I was 16 then, and I'm 19 now. My last exam was yesterday, and now I'm facing 4th year head on.

But before that, I have the summer to get through. I have 2 med school pre-requisites left, biochemistry 300a and 300b. I was going to take 300a this summer, but as it turns out, the class was canceled for lack of a professor to teach it. So I'm taking 300b, and depending on how that goes, I'm either taking 300a in the fall or next summer again if I feel that would increase my chances of getting high marks. Sonia, my friend and roommate, just took biochemistry 200, and from the looks of it, it's a tough, tough course. One of those courses where a ton of it is just strict memorization, bits and pieces of info that I'll have to structure somehow in my head. I think that's a big mistake alot of people make. They try to memorize bits and pieces like bits and pieces, without sticking them together in any meaningful way. If you don't try to stick them together (or more likely in my case, don't leave yourself enough time to do it), then little chunks are going to leak out the side of your head. That's why mind maps are so great. They stick pieces together in a way that's logical for your brain. The brain doesn't work linearly, it works like web, with little nodes of information and little highways connecting the nodes... but I digress.

Biochemistry 300b. That's one hurdle. The next hurdle is much bigger, much scarier, much more responsibility.

The MCAT.

For those not in the know, this is the official Medical College Admissions Test. The only objective way for medical schools to compare undergraduates from all different walks of life, university and life experience, etc. It is a 5.5 hour computer based test that not only requires your fluency and expertise in biology, chemistry, physics, verbal comprehension and writing, but requires you to apply it in ways you've never seen before under strict time constraints. In other words, it tests you on exactly the stuff a good doctor is great at. And I plan to rock its socks off.

There are 2 main schools of thought when it comes to MCAT preparation. One is self-study, where the prospective med student gets a couple of the commercially available tomes of MCAT preparation, makes friends with the local library, and prepares to live and breathe the finer points of of the basic sciences and whatnot. The other is where said med student reaches deep, deep down into his or her pockets and takes out about $1800. He or she then forks it over to a company who is offering in exchange one of the oft-heard of "MCAT courses." These are, according to myth, alot like regular classes, except much more goal oriented, and much more intensive. It is designed solely to increase your chances of getting a higher score on the MCAT.

As for me, I'm with the first school. Mainly because I have more will power than money.

And that friends, is my summer. Wish me luck!

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'