November surprise! WIth bonus parentheses!

It was damn cold this morning (well, 21 F, which is damn cold for the first week in November, anyways) and so I got out my winter coat. And lo and behold, there was a November surprise in it! Twenty bucks in the pocket! YES!!!! Finding money in my winter coat is the highlight of fall for me. I never intentionally leave any there, but almost every year I find some. Usually it's not quite twenty dollars, but I do remember one happy year that it was forty.

I needed the little lift because I was pretty tired. I must admit that by Friday of every week, I am more than ready for the weekend. One positive of the weekend is obvious -- I don't have to get up at 6:30 am. This is a big plus. The other positive is that I can get so much more work done! Looking back over that sentence I realize that it might sound a bit pathetic but it's true. By the time I get home from school most days it's almost 6 pm. Usually I take a shower because after gross lab, I stink. Make and eat dinner, and it's already 7. For my own sanity, I try to take a half-hour to an hour break at some point during the evening. I might watch a TV show, read a some of a non-med school book, talk to friends, or go online (or even blog!). That leaves maybe three-ish hours to get actual studying done if I want to get to bed "on time" (around 11 is my goal) (this almost never happens).

One thing I study every school night (even if I'm taking it "off") is the dissector for gross lab. It's rather sad how inadequate that always seems to be once I'm in lab, but it is infinitely better than not looking at it. In order to do this well (at least for the way my mind works), this involves reading the pages in the dissector and then matching them up with pictures from Rohen's (a photographic anatomy atlas that shows actual cadaver dissections), Netter's (idealized but wonderfully clear drawings), and information from Gray's (our required textbook). (I like Moore's a lot better but it's just easier to stick with Gray's since I don't have to go hunting down the requisite page numbers.) For a relatively straightforward lab, this takes roughly half an hour. There don't seem to be a whole lot of those, so mostly it's around an hour spent on that.

In an ideal world, I would then proceed to review the information from the day's lectures and read ahead for the next day. Please pardon me while I cackle rather maniacally at the notion of actually having the time and/or energy to do that every day for every subject. Basically I triage -- what concepts did I have the hardest time with during the day, what subjects did the lecturer gloss over and then say, "You'll have to read about that in your free time"? That's what gets my attention. I do almost always at least preview/skim the next day's lecture notes or PowerPoint slides so I have an idea of what to expect. Occasionally I have been rewarded for doing so by realizing that it's something I already know well, which gives me a nice warm happy glow (this has happened a few times in physio). When I preview biochem it's usually followed by some creative cursing. (Have I talked yet about how my anatomy lab partners know what time it is based on how much cussing I am doing in lab?) So really, on weeknights, I am just keeping my head above water.

It's on the weekends that I actually get the bulk of my effective studying in. A nice long stretch of uninterrupted time for me to get my study on is really what works best for me. I'm a slow starter, but once I get in the zone I am good for hours. Taking that day off last weekend really did set me behind for the week, I think. Unfortunately, next weekend I am going to be busy (but fortunately it will be with fun things!), and I've got two exams this week, so I foresee sacrificing sleep time on weeknights in order to make sure that I can stay close enough on top of things that the lost time won't be too detrimental. After that weekend, I have an anatomy exam on Tuesday, and then no more exams until finals, though, so I should have some catch up time in there. OMG, two and a half whole weeks without a test! It's going to seem like heaven. Of course, then there will be three in three days. But, bah, I'll cross that bridge when I get there.

One random observation before I head off to bed:

The Law of Lab: my partners and I have established that there is definitely a Law of Lab, which states that you will have alternatingly horrific and great days in gross lab. This phenomenon is totally independent of the intrinsic difficulty or lack thereof in any particular day's assigned dissection. Instead it is a function of TA/instructor availability. We do have a ridiculous amount of help available to us. Unfortunately the distribution of that help is very uneven. They, understandably, try to help out the people who seem to be having the most difficulty. These are usually the people who had a horrific day during the last lab and are hence behind. The instructor will then come over, wave their hands, and the anatomy of the requisite portion of the body will magically be made so apparent that even the most blithering idiot could clearly see order in what had previously been chaos. That instructor, having gotten into your group and your cadaver, will tend to remain highly involved for the remainder of the period and as such the day's dissection will proceed swimmingly. Meanwhile, of course, the group whose last lab session went great is now mired in horrificness and they are waving their hands futilely in an attempt to attract the attention of the engrossed instructor, and the minutes tick by. This group then does not finish their lab, which results in them getting all the instructor attention the next day. And so the vicious cycle continues. And such is the Law of Lab. The only thing that can modify the Law of Lab even slightly is the Interesting Finding. This results in everyone coming over to your table, which is great, since you get all sorts of instructor attention and learn a lot, but bad, because you lose valuable time while trying to explain the Interesting Finding to everyone else. So, in the end, it's usually pretty much a wash.