path n pharm

About two years ago when I just crossed over into clinical school proper, it was as if I had forever to prepare for the part II exams but alas, one morning I woke up and it was nigh.
The eight weeks preceding the exams was mighty intensive with lectures and practicals spanning from 8am – 5pm leaving you extremely tired by the time you got back in the evenings such that you had to devise a plan either to read late into the night or sleep early and wake up later in the middle of the night to read. I practised both and both had their pros and cons. Reading late into the night usually is not very effective as you are tired and it might take two hours to read what you should have read in thirty minutes and you ‘ld probably still need to read a second time while on the other hand, sleeping early could result in a night-long sleep and then you feel like beating yourself up in the morning
Tutorials were ubiquitous but they really weren’t my thing cos they usually start too early and then superfluous stuff is usually emphasized.
Despite the busy schedule in block II posting, during the first few weeks, my roommate & I always found time to play soccer on my ps3 (i had both Fifa 08 & Pro-Evo 2008)- sometimes, very late into the night. When reality dawned on us, my room-mate decided to stow the TV away on the balcony (funny isn’t it?) but most of the time when he felt like watching TV, he would then go visiting friends and end up watching as much TV as he would have if he had watched the TV in our room.
I, on the other hand, had a habit of going to Awo hall in faraway UI to read. It’s not as if it was more conducive for reading – in fact, distractions abound but unknown forces kept making me go. Before you start thinking that I’m weird, let me inform you that quite a number of my classmates were also reading in Awo – for obvious reasons and at times I wonder if it isn’t easier for a medical student to get a girlfriend than even a movie star.
The exams took about a week in all with people saying all kinds and making photocopies of all sorts of materials – materials they couldn’t possibly finish reading in one whole year, but they made them all the same, maybe just to satisfy their conscience.
For most of us, passing exams had never been a question, it was how well we could pass, but not this time, almost everyone looked forward to the results with so much fear that you could cut it with a knife and in the end, the results weren’t so good.
I’m now in Igbo-Ora for a 6-week rotation in community medicine and can’t wait to write about all this FUNSENSE (or how do I describe so much FUN amidst pure NONSENSE?). It is mind-boggling how some people end up specializing in PSM after 6 years in Med Skool – I’d rather teach primary school pupils, Social studies.