Summing Up Semester II (5 Days In)

     Everyone knew going in to semester II that it would be tougher and busier. We thought we were prepared. Nope. First there was the announcement that our pharmacology final for this term would be cumulative for the ENTIRE YEAR. It makes sense, but that announcement still was not taken well. In our next class, things looked up a bit when the teacher mentioned that she knew how busy we were for other classes and said she’d purposely tried to go a bit easier on the assignments. Then we actually looked at the schedule and realized that, per class period, she’d given us almost twice as many assignments as any other class. The biggest shocker came with anatomy though. It appears that some faculty members thought our class would be divided into two groups and one group would have lab on Tuesday and the other would have lab on Thursday. Even the registrar seemed to think this way, with the schedule initially saying we’d have lab on one of the two days, and which day would be determined “by arrangement.” No one seemed to have talked to our actual professor though. It turns out that we actually have lab on BOTH Tuesday and Thursday, as well as lectures on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday (we knew about those ahead of time at least), and dissections occur after lectures in our “free” time (that was a shocker to some people). Really, had we just had accurate information about labs ahead of time, we might have been a little upset or disappointed, but we would have accepted it. Instead, it felt a bit like they’d suddenly added 2-5 hours to our weekly schedule without warning. It was sort of like hitting a wall. Now that the initial shock has passed, I think we're all ready to buckle down and prepare for a crazy semester, but it was certainly a rough start. 
     On a positive note, Wednesday we began our cadaver dissections. The reason we'd been split into groups was because only one group dissects for each lab, and another group helps them. Then the group that dissected gives presentations to the whole class during our lab time. I was in the first group to dissect and was able to do the head and neck. I always loved dissections in previous anatomy classes, but this was the first time I was working on a human body. I wasn't sure how I'd handle it. It turns out that I was fine. I was most worried about seeing the donor's face, but once I did, I just felt thankful that she'd decided to donate herself so that I could learn. Then the whole dissection was quite simply fascinating and rather fun. It's one thing to see muscles in a cat; it's quite another to look at the muscles and tissue of another human and realize what you look like under your own skin.

    By the way, the picture at the top comes from this Buzzfeed article: http://www.buzzfeed.com/joannaborns/realistic-inspirational-sayings