Posted by alexandra_k on August 3, 2015, at 22:29:13
In reply to Re: I have figured it out., posted by alexandra_k on July 31, 2015, at 19:22:00
so, it just properly hit me today... if you get to do a heart transplant you might actually get to hold a living and beating live healthy heart in your hands. how cool is that? really... i mean... wow.
when we did the rat dissection i found myself looking around a bit... sort of... is it alright for me to be doing this? i mean... really? it's okay? i should be a bit aggressive with the blunt scissors to open the peritoneal cavity? to hack through the ribs... to hack through the jaw to expose the epiglottis? we are really allowed to be doing this?
it is pretty freaky...
i'm really enjoying my classes this semester. Medsci is great. it is just so interesting... i'm happy spending most of my time studying for it because it is so interesting... And law is going pretty great... very much a new application of philosophy skills... I didn't realise that this country is so new... has only been making it's own laws pretty recently (like, in the last 30 years) and so on... that's the problem, really. developing the knowledgeable people to run this country well... it is taking time and people do head off overseas...
But medsci is great, yeah. i am disappointed that i really don't think i will get to do medicine next year (there actually is some ambiguity in their application stuff where i might actually be able to apply since i will have done a full time year and i have done a degree already...)... but then... Given that I really do want to do the science / surgery / anatomy side of it (not singing placebo to the masses in rural communities or nodding and smiling because that is so much cheaper than running tests of prescribing things or actually treating people...) ... I might be better off doing a couple more years of medsci before going in. so i'm more likely to do better on the exams etc so i'm more likely to get good placements / to be slightly impressive or at least not too ignorant and or annoying on placement / to get accepted to further training programs... I don't know... The physiology is about to pick up with cardio, I think... Lets see if I can keep up...
Anyway... Happy, yeah. I was really worried after last semester. I've done some of the practice multiple choice assessments for Medsci and... Have come home, yeah. Like the UMAT. I know I didn't do well at it (due to my own lack of study on it) but then... They were fair questions. Not ambiguous or (IMHO wrong). Which is what most of last semester seemed to me to be in biology and population health. So... Huge relief that Medsci is making sense to me. It is mostly about the volume of information, yeah. Not to say it isn't about understanding... But you have a volume to get through before you have the information you need to be puzzling about... And it just takes time, yeah. Fortunately... It is really interesting, yeah. A heart. An actual beating heart. Damn.
I feel like some part of my brain woke up during the UMAT test... In the practice for it all the practice is online... And I tried printing off bits... But they tell you not to... And then I read something about how if you practice a skill in (certain kinds of) non-optimal conditions then that can result in your having increased performance under ideal conditions. And so I sort of went with that... Only working through problems on the computer (which, for me is far from ideal). And it used to be in three sections. All the science reasoning first then the verbal and then the picture sequencing pattern stuff. But now it is all jumbled up... And so some people are saying to go through one kind of task and then the next and then... And with it not being in sections now you really need to figure how you are going to pace things... Anyway... I thought I would basically not worry about any of this and just see how I found it...
I feel like part of my brain has woken up to the picture completion / pattern recognition. Especially having it on paper there in front of me. I can use my hands to cover irrelevant bits... That seemed to me to be a significant part of the test - your ability to ignore the distractors. I'm probably not to great at that (I think maybe my working memory workbench is a bit on the small side so I need external / environmental strategies to help with that defecit). .. Anyway... Using my hand to cover up answers I've eliminated or aspects I'm not supposed to focus on... It really helped, yeah. And just seeing a problem and going 'oh, its a growing pattern I remember those' or it's a '+1, +2, +3...' or whatever. I have some of the categories, now and sometimes the pattern... Is almost pop out in it's salience. More practice, for sure. Really loving the visuo-spatial thing. Doign that too with anatomy... Different sections... Building a mental picture. Lots of closing your eyes and visually remembering... Before sleep seems best... Brain really seems to remember... Visuospatial workbench increasing f*ck yeah!
It is great fun, yeah. Like the gym... When I felt like a different part of my brain woke up, or something.
Life is pretty good. Yeah :-)
poster:alexandra_k
thread:1076978
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20150604/msgs/1080984.html