During my review days, I was doing pretty well on practice exams, actually acing it in unexpected times. It wasn’t what I used to do way back in college. So when my review mates asked me one day how I’m doing it, I just blurted out that i wanted revenge.
I’m an invisible college student. Nowhere near the lime light and grateful not at the bottom. I chose to be an average-off-the-radar kind from the moment I realized how college grades were run.
I don’t detest college. Going through it was actually a huge challenge with all tests of reality blaring at your face and changes starts to happen from where you stand. I get to learn and do new things and meet different kinds of people. These were good times. :)
The downside of it all is the part where I had to break my head in half just to memorize medicines, anatomical parts and medical jargons just to enumerate for the next day’s quiz. After which, all these terms I somehow crammed in my head would just slip away from my brain leaving me only memorable ones such as the gastrocnemius, enoxaparin, and laminectomy. I’ve “accepted” this kind of learning and moved with it from my first semester to the last.
I’d enjoy going through exams that allows me to analyze what to do with a patient having air embolism and then do my worst on the ones that asks to enumerate the plant alkaloids and antimetabolites. That was how it was run, and I can’t do anything but carry on. I hated memorizing. I’m this hard-headed, wishing the next quiz wouldn’t involve making another list of words that doesn’t mean a thing.
My subconscious revenge, I suppose, is to prove that I need not memorize a book verbatim to get a reasonable high mark in the board exams. I’ve accepted the fact that I can’t memorize and I can’t get great marks for it. So i took the other approach.
When I started reading through my thick heavy books, I just read it through and try to understand what is written in it. I make the words fit and make it a memory that I’ll remember when the puzzling questions come. When remembering a new term necessitates more recalling, I posted it on my walls, repeated it in my head, and make it a part of some silly story. Suddenly, I started to like reading about anatomy and pathophysiology. I liked the feeling of being able to explain how the blood runs through our body, understand how the kidneys malfunction, why the liver is such a big deal, and more of that stuff. That was how I did it.
I did get my revenge. But calling it revenge really doesn’t sound right anymore. It was actually more than what it is. It wasn’t a revenge because I knew in me that I’ve made so much effort not just because of these cranky thoughts but because most of the time, I just kept my ground then aimed high. I wanted for once to prove in me that I’m not failing, and that I can really make things happen if a I work hard for it.
I did it, and it was beyond my own expectations. :)
