It's A Small World

I haven't written much about my work in the Office of Neurosurgery lately, mostly because my working isn't particularly exciting. Some of it is sort of borderline interesting, like collecting the statistics on operations performed by various doctors from the departmental records and from the OR records, and comparing the two. Sometimes there's a big discrepancy because the OR won't credit non-lead surgeons despite their participation, and the comparison is necessary to show that certain doctors have been doing as much, if not a good deal more, work than they should be. All in all though, it's fairly slow and uneventful work.

Today while sorting files, I ran into one from an old friend. Friend's not the word really... I only knew her briefly and we didn't leave on very good terms. It was the first pseudo-ethical dilemma I've had here, really. It was tempting to open the file and see what was wrong. I didn't, of course, because that would have been horrible of me in addition to violating all sorts of professional conduct rules, but the temptation was there.

Whatever happened, here's hoping she manages to get through it well. Neurological problems can suck. I know.

Apart from this, I'm getting more and more worried about Physics. I can still follow what goes on in class just fine, but I absolutely positively cannot make sense of our textbook. There's a million and one symbols in it, and I don't even know how to say them all. Then it starts talking about integrals, which we never covered in our first semester Calculus course.... It's really really disconcerting, and I don't know what to do.

Failing the class (or getting a C) simply isn't an option. Even a B isn't very good. I'm someone who quit grad school, so I suspect anything less than stellar will be likely to raise red flags to the admissions committee.

So I need to figure out a good plan of action. I think I'll meet the teacher this week and talk to him, which is fairly rare for me... I'm not the type of person who likes to drop in on office hours for better or worse, but right now I think I've got to.

The First Week [Fall 09]

I've been run through one of every class now (with the exception of my physics lab, which doesn't start meeting till next week), and thought I'd put down my thoughts on them.

Physics:
It takes all the math stuff I dislike, and makes it trickier. Plus, this is the first teacher I've ever had who's explicitly said that he's going to make his tests hard; most of my teachers have just said something about how they'll be "appropriate" when some nosy student brings it up. I have no clue what a "hard" test means to him, and I won't find out for some time. Until I do find out, that's going to be a cause for concern.

The course itself seems tough. We have lots of work assigned from online sources, offline sources, and then we have lots of textbook reading (although not nearly as much reading as there was in law school). I'm not sure how easy or difficult these will be, so I'm not sure how much time it will consume. It seems like it will be difficult though, if I want to stay on top of things (and I do).

Our teacher is in love with tech gadgets. That shows up in the use of Powerpoint (which I guess is common nowadays... I /hate/ it. I could have a huge rant about how terrible it is, and I might post that rant someday).

He also uses little remote controls in class, so he can ask questions, we can input the answer, and everyone can see who put in what (anonymously, but there's a computer program that breaks down the stats and graphs them instantly). Unlike Powerpoint, this is very neat. I can see lots of uses for it, besides the novelty. It helps him see if he has to slow down and it helps students see where they stand in relation to the rest of the class.

Grading wise, only ~40% of our grade is determined from the exams (which is probably why he wants them to be difficult). The other 60% is a combination of attendance, participation, physics lab, homework, and online homework. I've never had a grading set up like that, so I'm not quite sure what I think of it yet.

Chemistry:
Our Chemistry teacher makes good (by which I mean frequent) use of powerpoint as well, but doesn't bring online assignments, little remote controls, or any other technological gadgets to bear.

I'm sure it won't be an "easy" course, but I feel much more comfortable in Chemistry than in Physics. I'm looking forward to it, actually. The teacher seems nice enough, and I think she's on the lenient side. She said ~80% of exam questions will be copied from assigned homework questions, which means there's no excuse for getting lower than an 80% on any exam. That sort of stuff helps my GPA, but it won't help me when I take my MCAT in a year. So I've got to make sure I stay 100% focused, and learn the material well enough to keep it with me until I get to my MCAT - not just well enough to manage a 4.0 in the course.

The thing about this class is that it's, more or less, a first year class. Calculus was too, but it had some older students since I took it during the summer. Being in a course with a full compliment of freshman really brings out the fact that I'm older than these people. I never thought of myself as having changed /that/ much since college, but I'm really a bit self conscious about it. It's funny, and sort of depressing at the same time.

Chemistry Lab:
Chemistry lab looks a lot like my old chemistry lab at Vanderbilt (I took one semester of Gen. Chem. there - I didn't take the second though, so I get to do it all over here). The lab itself is, marginally, nicer than the lab I had at Vanderbilt, though the lab I had there was in an old building that was being redone (I took Chemistry there my first year, by my last year the building had been completely redone and was /much/ nicer). Still, that's a pleasant surprise.

We got lab partners, and I think I like the one I'm with. I don't really know after just one day of course, and that's one day without any experiments. Just in cleaning up the drawers and taking inventory of our things and such though, you can get a sense of a person. How self-motivated they are, how able to assist they are, how careful they are, and how you'll be able to get along with them in general. Having a bad lab partner for a semester would be unfortunate, but I don't think that will be a problem at all.

And Classes Start Once More

I had a fun little mini-vacation. There was a lot of stress from being locked up around my parents for a week for the first time in two years or so, but things more or less worked out. And I got to see wild deer (the kind living in a marsh, as opposed to the one eating up your backyard garden), ponies, jelly fish, and who knows how many different kinds of birds. The water was warm, although I couldn't go in it too much; one of the waves reminded me just how injured my shoulder is, and how little pressure it can take at an awkward angle to briefly light it up with pain. Still - the beach was fun, the food was fun, the sun was fun, my books were fun, and the wildlife watching was fun.

But now I'm back. My courses start tomorrow.

This means, of course, that it's time to drop everything else and focus. I had a few quick looks at my books and lab manuals. They seem a little bit intimidating, but hopefully it's not as bad as the first glance makes it out to be. I'm quite excited to get started up again, actually, and am really looking forward to tomorrow.

I need to get going on sorting out my extra-curriculars, be that continuing the ones I have, rescheduling things, or finding new ones. I'll probably wait a week before I start really worrying about that though, so I have time to settle into my courses.

Results

My Calculus grades got placed in the system today and I've ended up with an A, which is absolutely fantastic. I suspect that our grades might have been curved up a percentage point or two as a result of some other people doing very poorly on the final, but I could be mistaken. It's possible that I simply got a few more of the "maybe this is right..." questions than I expected. I'll never get the test back so I'll never really know.

Either way: the important things are that I got a good GPA and that I feel I worked hard and understood the material well enough to earn it.

Thoughts On My Calculus Final

I've never been so happy about an exam I've done so poorly on before.

Ok. So I don't know exactly how well or poorly I did, but I have pretty fair sense. I'm almost sure I got a 75% at least. If I messed up and got something wrong that I'm fairly certain I got right, I'll still be above the magic 67% mark for an A- GPA. There were four or so problems I was able to get answers for, without having any serious confidence in the answer I came up with. It's unlikely, but still possible that the grade could shoot from a 75% to a high 80%, or even a low 90%, and I'd get a 4.0 in the course.

I finished the problems I was able to do easily, and was right under the 67% mark. I freaked out a bit, but pulled myself together. I've never had as much satisfaction from solving a problem as I did when I got one I'd been staring at for 10 minutes, and thought I was completely stuck on. That's the problem that (probably) shot my final grade up to an A-. After that I got a few others when I remembered that you can't differentiate the absolute value function at 0, etc, but nothing compared.

I also relearned two things I really knew all along:

• Don't let yourself take a week off mentally because things seem like a sealed deal- it can easily catch up with you.
• Don't go out and celebrate success up to a point in a course when you should be using that time to study for success at the course's completion.

I'm lucky things ended well, and that I'd been able to do so well up to the final to give myself the buffer I had. Things could easily have ended up differently. I'll make sure to never loose sight of these points again; I might even make a wallpaper for my pc with a list of "things to remember" artfully included.

What now? Some well-earned vacation.

Courses will start again in roughly three weeks. I get to spend one of those weeks at the beach looking at ponies and other assorted wildlife. The other two I'll spend coming up with a new plan of action.

Edit: I've changed the layout to something darker. I don't know if it's better or not, but it's different, and I like the change for now. I'll work on making this a real site in the future, I think, but that's a distant and unimportant priority.