Staking Finals

For the past few years, working hard was a priority. Attending most lectures, scribbling down pages of notes, writing up the perfect notes, revise, make changes to notes, revise and revise and revise till exams. Much of my notes last year was handwritten, highlighted, filed and stored. Diagrams from lectures were drawn from scratch, colored in with colour pencils. Last year, there were nights when I would stay up till really late, studying hard, memorizing any fact that I could take in.

And I never really understood why I was so behind other people, mocking myself for being not the ideal student that I imagined myself to be. In my finals, an examiner asked me What's the pathophysiology of asthma? I told her, starting from the beginning, of how mast cells would degranulate, of how Th2 cells were activated instead of Th1, of how eosinophils would exacerbate the problem. I was running out of time, but the examiner said that my answer was not the one she was looking for.

And the answer? The child couldn't breathe because his airways was blocked.

I ran out of time. Having only answered a bit more than half of the questions intended.
It was a painful lesson learnt. Details render you useless if you forget the big picture. That's medicine I guess. I cannot describe to you how much I owe to the other three kind examiners that helped me along. If not, I would have failed second year completely.
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This year, I'm taking on a different route. Gone are the days of spending hours writing notes, notes are now mostly printed and drawn upon, and if not, they are written on the spot in the lectures. I try very hard to combat my "working hard" style, hoping that "knowing less is more". I'm not delving into the minute details, constantly reminding myself of the wide picture, focussing on the major points.

I have to keep telling myself that learning 10 side effects of each drug would get me nowhere. Just 2 or 3 would be enough, and the rest (if asked) will be done by guess work on the spot. My method of studying has changed dramatically, hopefully for the better, because it would really suck for a repeat just because of poor technique.

Huge risk this year. Oweing to the fact that I would have studied twice as hard if I was the person before. Will this work? I guess time will tell.