Weekly update. I cannot believe there are two weeks left of the first year of university; the sun's staying out for longer, the end-of-year fatigue is settling in, there's talk of exam revision all over the place. Summer is looming near and hopefully with it, eased restrictions and a bit more freedom.
Decent week this week.
I had a chat with a faculty member, who ensured me my mental health was fine and advised me to review some past exam questions just to make sure I'm able to study with a direction (she suspected that I'm studying more than I need to, which I agree but also disagree with). Funny that -- in VCE I had a very good idea of what to revise, maybe because of the study design system and ubiquity of past exams/commercial exams, but now I'm completely thrown off. That's just the HS-Uni transition at work, I suppose.
I've gone through one past exam for Semester 2 and one for Sem 1 without having revised first, just to check my knowledge. Semester 2's past exam was fine -- I was surprised that I could get almost all the answers correct. Sem 1, not so much -- I went through it in a call with other classmates and we had an extreme amount of difficulty with immunology, which happened to be 90% of the paper, literally. At least it's good that I know to spend time on immunology (never understood the MHCs, I forgot the complement system components anyway) University exams are so much simpler than high school, really...
In terms of content, the past week was asynchronous and focused on the heart; I've learnt a lot, like how to read ECGs, the coronary arteries, atherosclerosis, hypertension, reading arrhythmias, heart attacks, taking the cardiovascular history.. phew. Anatomy's also thrown at us a myriad of lectures (I htink easily >3 hours?) which were a pain to get through, but more tedious than difficult -- the embryology of the heart, the thoracic cage and diaphragm and the adult heart's anatomy. But at the end of the day, it's still satisfying to get closer to viewing the body as an intricate, interwoven "whole" rather than isolated systems and areas; compartment syndrome makes more sense when you can understand how fluid can get to the place where it starts compressing stuff.
Thank goodness for textbooks; Katzung's pharmacology and Hampton's The ECG Made Easy have been really great for learning about alpha/beta blockers (for this week anyway, it's always been a stalwart source of info) and learning how to read ECGs. In fact, The ECG Made Easy was better at explaining some other stuff than the faculty notes.
Take care, and good luck with your exam revision!