General life updates: A couple of things have happened over the past few weeks after the results for sem 1 came out:
1. I’ve registered for the September GAMSAT sitting a few days ago, it’s round 2 for me and realistically I’m aiming for around 67-70. Now I’m familiar with the question styles from my first GAMSAT sitting in March, I’ll focus on getting into the exam writers’ heads and write similar questions for myself to answer.
2. My unit Moodle pages just came up for sem 2, although there are no useful info on them at the moment. I was keen on watching all the week 1 lectures during O-week so that at worst I’ll only have 11 weeks of lectures to binge when SWOTVAC comes given my usual level of procrastination.
3. I was invited by the BMS2031 teaching team to attend an 1-hr Zoom call on how they could improve labs. I’m looking forward to it because I’m quite interested in education myself and this is a perfect networking opportunity for a potential PHY3990 project with Julia’s physiology education lab group.
4. At the last minute, I dropped CHM2942 because the lab content was so confusing (too many self-designed experiments with almost no hints) and the unit looks like it’s not well coordinated as there are actually quizzes you have to complete inside the tutes. Normally I use tutes to reinforce lecture content, but if I’m too concerned about the quiz at the end, I’m likely to be distracted and not pay so much attention. I have enrolled myself in CHM2922 which is physical+instrumental chem because the other day in my VCE server, I was trying to answer some kids’ questions on spectroscopy and electrochem but ended up confusing myself, so I figured that I couldn’t become a competent chem teacher without doing that unit. It looks like there will be a lot of maths involved, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it won’t require too many new skills from CHM1011.
On another note, since this marks the halfway mark through my 3-year biomed degree, I feel like I’m having a mid-degree crisis, so I decided to calm myself down by turning this journal update into a year 2 sem 1 survival guide, reflecting on what study/life habits I’m likely to change for sem 2.
General Y2 S1 observations: So for those who are unfamiliar with how biomed units work at Monash, in 2nd year 1st sem you’ll be studying BMS2011 (anatomy), BMS2021 (biochem) and BMS2031 (physiology) along with 1 elective of your choice. My elective was CHM2911 which is basically an extended, 2nd year version of CHM1022 focusing on organic and inorganic synthesis. Not that long ago, anatomy, biochem and physiology were the 3 prereqs for a postgrad MD and a general consensus is that they’re the most intimidating premed core units. I’ve found that the best way to tackle this semester is to adopt an integrated approach, or to put it more plainly, use a subject you’re confident in to steal the other subjects with overlaps.
For me, the subject I was most confident with was chem maybe from all those late night Breaking Bad binges. I used Le Chatelier’s Principle I learned in year 12 (and expanded upon in 1st and 2nd year uni chem) to steal physiology, because when you think about it, physiology is basically equilibrium systems applied on a biological and macroscopic scale (homeostasis). It boils down to when you have too much of something, you don't want more of it. Likewise, if there's a stimulus that takes your body away from an ideal level of something, you'd want to restore it back to the optimal level by making a change opposite to the direction of the change caused by the initial stimulus. If you understand physiology in terms of equilibrium systems, it is virtually impossible to forget the physiological trends compared to if you memorised them via brute force. The autonomic nervous system, neuroendocrine and pharmacology stuff you learn in BMS1052 (1st year neurobio) comes back as well, so knowing how the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems work is crucial (there is also overlap of this with your anatomy unit if you decide that anatomy is your most confident subject that you use to steal others).
Similarly to physiology, you can also explain large chunks of biochem away with Le Chat's rule, especially in the metabolism lecture topic which itself overlaps heavily with BMS1011, your 1st year biochem unit. The various signalling pathways and specific phosphorylation cascades introduced to you in biochem come in VERY handy in physiology as well when you're asked to explain exactly what happens when a neurotransmitter/hormone binds to its receptor and how exactly the given signalling pathway alter physiological function on a molecular scale. These pathways also overlap with other lecture topics you cover within the same biochem unit, an example would be overactive growth/proliferation signalling pathways= cancer.
Finally anatomy is the tough one which traditionally required a lot of brute force memorisation. Luckily, in physiology, they teach you a lot of anatomy because as they say, form fits function. Once you link form to function, learning anatomy will definitely be a lot more intuitive, partially eliminating the need for rote memorisation. The benefits of physiology knowledge on anatomy study is reciprocated, because anatomy explains some difficult physiological concepts that the physiology lecturers take for granted and don’t explain adequately. An example would what muscles are active during passive/active/vigorous inhalation or exhalation, and how that would affect passive/active/vigorous inhalation/exhalation rates. All the hormone stuff in physiology and embryonic development stuff from biochem complement really well with the reproductive anatomy and embryology content. Since both the anatomy and physiology units are organised (pun 100% intended) into body systems (cardiovascular, urinary, endocrine, respiratory, digestive and reproductive), you can pretty much understand one from the other.
Another trend I have noticed is that exam difficulty is inversely proportional to in-sem assessment difficulty. For instance, anatomy which had extremely difficult lab tests had a super easy final exam (although it’s closed book). Meanwhile, physiology in-sem labs and tests were all free marks, but the final exam was a killer. Despite being open-book, you’re not given enough time to check over your answers. Biochem was middle of the road both in terms of in-sem assessment and final exam difficulty, However, this doesn’t seem to apply to CHM2911, because the exam was of average difficulty (leaning on the easy side) while the lab reports, assessed tutes and prelecture quizzes which were conducted open-book were absolute steals.
What I regretted: Cramming for the memorisation-intensive subjects *cough* anatomy *cough* due to missing lectures. While I was able to cram a lot of content into my brain just in time for the final exam during SWOTVAC, I still felt I didn’t get the most out of my time in the unit. Additionally, falling 2 or so weeks behind in anatomy wasn’t the brightest of ideas, it costed me dearly in terms of in-semester assessments where I scored poorly and I looked like a total idiot in the labs because I didn’t know what I was doing.
To a lesser extent, this was also true for physiology. I was overconfident for the exam because my in-sem score for physiology was 67/70 and the exam which consisted the remaining 30% of the unit grade was open book. However the final exam screwed me over because by the time I finished the exam, I had no time to proofread/check my responses. I only crammed digestive and reproductive systems at the last minute and I was explicitly informed beforehand that these topics will be examined disproportionately on the exam by Julia, so I guess that was entirely my fault for leaving it all last minute to SWOTVAC.
I also regretted not putting so much trust in my team members for group projects, which ended up in me getting some mixed peer reviews and hard feelings. Despite one person who I interpreted was playing mind games with me in the peer reviews, I’m not about to dismiss a perfectly valid message due to a bad messenger. The other awesome group members with whom I really bonded last sem (we genuinely cared about each others’ personal development) also provided me with the same feedback that I shouldn’t steal other peoples’ parts by completing everything on my own. I think I’ll come up with a better system to monitor team progress instead of assuming my group members are guilty until proven innocent.
What I’ll do next sem: I will continue to help other people on the Moodle forums because that will really help out my communication skills which is one of the criteria on the med interviews, as well as being an essential skill for a potential career in teaching. Besides, as they say, teaching is the best form of learning, if you can explain something well to someone else, you won’t have any problems explaining that you know your sh*t to the assessors on your final exam.
Since I’ve identified my shortcomings of last semester under my last heading, I feel what I need to do in order to address them is self evident. Although the solutions are pretty obvious, whether or not I can successfully implement them in practice remains to be seen, I’m confident I’m able to.
I’m aware that I didn’t reach my goal of raising my WAM into the mid 90s (mine is just a tad above 92 right now), however I’ve been looking for ways that help me break that ceiling. One of the info sources I will mention a little later highly recommends spaced repetition, especially a flashcard app called Anki. I used Anki for bio 3/4, but for some reason it didn’t really work well for me. I’m giving it a 2nd chance this sem, especially with the memorisation-heavy unit this sem ie microbio.
In accordance with my integrated approach, I can see that sem 2 is basically BMS1062 (biochem/molecular bio) disassembled, then amplified into 3 units, BMS2042 (genetics), BMS2052 (microbio) and BMS2062 (bioinformatics/molecular bio). My chem elective is CHM2922, which is very different from the rest, so I’m not sure if I can steal this unit with the knowledge from my other units. Most likely I’ll be using the physical chem stuff from CHM1011 to help me understand it. I’ll update this journal to give an indication of whether or not the integrated method still works for Y2 S2 (fingers crossed that it does).
I recently came across this very inspirational Reddit thread by a student-staff who once offered me some really valuable insights into how the postgrad med admission process works at Monash. This post which was announced almost a month prior to its publication inspired me to create my version of the guide for biomedders such as this very journal update, as well as suggesting some of the modifications to my study habits I intend to make this sem mentioned above:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monash/comments/ooo9gm/im_a_3rd_year_science_student_who_ended_first/