Wednesday, September 25, 2013

First Exam

First exam has come and gone.  


It's definitely a problem when you don't recognize terms in the question stem....or when you flag half the questions as "things you'll go back to later."  

The only reassuring thing was that 98% of the people n my room stayed until the final half hour of the exam, which means everyone else was just as clueless as me. Hooraaaay.  

We are now diving into musculoskeletal system.  I'm debating different things I could try to improve my study habits and retention.  Flashcards are definitely a must now.  Quizzing is definitely helpful, but I found that among my group of friends, I can only REALLY study with a handful.  Some people are way too chatty.  Group studies (for me at least) only work if everyone agrees to study in silence or to quiz each other on a pre-determined topic.  

I tried outlining...to give myself a better idea of "the big picture" of things and to help reorganize things in a way that is more sequential to me.  I've found that it's incredibly time consuming and is only effective if the lecture notes/course guide completely sucks (like when sentences and paragraphs are used to describe nucleotide synthesis pathways instead of diagrams).  

I might continue making outline-diagrams for Anatomy though, because if I draw something, I will definitely remember it. 

Interview season is gearing up for the pre-med hopefuls.  We're going to start seeing a lot of black-suited younglings walking around.