And here we are. I can't decide if it feels like the time went by quickly or slowly, it was probably a bit of each. Either way, the last two courses I need to take before I can apply for med school begin this Monday. Organic Chemistry is a year long course, so it won't finish this semester, but Cell Biology is only a one semester affair. I picked up my books for each today (and am worried the cell bio one is missing some sort of CD I might need), and am reasonably excited to get this underway.
Organic Chemistry is typically supposed to be one of the harder courses around. I don't want to say the goal is to weed out premeds, because I've run into very few teachers who genuinely want their students to not succeed, but that's typically the result. One of the problems (allegedly) is that people approach it as a massive memorization game - typically with disastrous results, because there's more you'd have to memorize than is achievable without something close to a photographic memory. The goal is to only memorize a few things, and then get a complete handle on the mechanisms behind reactions so that you can predict how X, Y, and Z will react given that they have similar properties to A, B, and C.
That's also why medical schools like the course, I think. The chemistry itself is only mildly useful, unless you're going to medical school to pursue a career in research. What's more useful is that the course forces you go through a process very similar to analyzing/diagnosing/treating rather than just memorizing a set of facts.
Additionally, I've already brought up how a good grade here will help me justify my bad grade in the second half of Physics as the result of simply never having seen an Integral before the course. A bad grade here, on the other hand, and it starts to show a pattern of me not being able to handle really difficult material. Two courses probably isn't enough to prove that pattern's presence or absence, but its all medical schools would have to go on so its importance is artificially inflated for me.
I don't know too much what Cell Biology will be like, although apparently we get to play with cancer cells in the lab at some point. Sounds very neat. Hopefully it won't take up too much time though, because Organic Chemistry and (of course) the MCAT have me much more concerned.
Speaking of the MCAT, I've fallen off my flash card studying a bit since I left for my vacation, and need to get back on top of that. The test itself is really overwhelming, and I'm just not sure how to approach it. It has so much on it, and right now I'm just sort of looking at it dumbfoundedly (which is, I guarantee, the worst way to prepare). I think that might actually be an argument for starting the MCAT review in October, rather than the one I had been leaning towards in January. Having some company help me break it up into smaller pieces at an early start date could be helpful, since it seems pretty tough to do by myself. I'll be able to force-cram closer to the test just fine on my own though, and don't need to pay anyone for help with that.
It's not an overwhelming reason to start in October, but I'm thinking about it much more seriously now.
