Bring on the fall

i'm writing this during my actual fall break, which is a week long miracle of relaxtion, of which i am half way through partaking of. this semester is so bloody nuts. i have about 40 hours a week of extra curricular that i need to do on top of my classes, which are gen chem 2, cell bio, and physics. so it's a heavy classload to start off with. cell bio was introduced as the hardest class we have ever taken. i heard lots of warnings about this professor, including from biology TAs who had talked about getting like 50s on his exams. so that was a great little pep talk. but i actually am really interested in cell bio so i'm not too worried about it. i managed to pull off a 98.5 on the first test, with another one in a little over a week, so i needs to get to studying. its really complicated material, and there's a lot of it, so it will be a lot harder than the first test. i really like my physics class too. since i basically slept through physics in high school and got an F in it, and that was back in 1992, i pretty much had no idea what physics was all about. but i get into the problem solving and enjoy the challenge, so it's been a cool class. i got a 100 on my first test, and just took my second one, and should find out this week how i did on it. as for gen chem, it's a different story. i've really enjoyed my chem classes up to this point, but i'm having a hard time staying motivated. after doing o chem over the summer and then having to go back to gen chem, it's hard to get into just doing equations and math again. i'm just like "where's the chemistry". i really liked o chem, and gen chem is just a little dry and useless, since all of the stuff you have to memorize, i've been told you don't really have to have memorized in the real world of chemistry. so it kind of seems like busy work. add that to the fact that on the first test, the only points i missed were four points on a problem that i got right but they said i didn't show enough work. it said to show your work, because there were only two choices to make, so you had a 50/50 chance of getting it right. there are two criteria that a mechanism has to pass in order to be valid, i tried out the first criteria on the first mechanism to see if it was valid, and it didn't pass the first criteria, so i skipped the second one, since it obviously wasn't valid, and then showed all the steps for the second mechanism which met both criteria. they docked me four points for not showing all steps for both of them. so i got a 96. i was so irritated, i had words with the teacher. that isn't how it works in the real world. if something has two requirements, and one isn't met, you don't have to test the other one. it's a ridiculous waste of time, during a time sensitive test. so lame. but all in all, things are going pretty well. in addition to these classes, i do 15 hours a week of research (details in the next post), up at huntsman cancer institute, which i love, but also takes about 5 hours of total travel time, for the week, with all of the walking and waiting for the bus that i have to do. i also volunteer 4 hours at the hospital, and 3 hours a week at a cancer wellness house, where i have been doing yardwork for them over the summer. i also TA biology, which takes about 10 hours a week, including the four classes that i have to attend during the week, a two to three hour library review that i teach every week, plus time that we take for TA meeting and my own study and review. i also am VP of AED, the premed honor society, that takes a few hours every week. so it all adds up, and my day runs from 5:10 in the morning when i wake up to catch the bus at 6AM to 10:45 at night when i get home, monday through thursday. friday isn't so bad, i get home at 8:45, but i also end up studying for around 7 hours on saturday too, so i can stay caught up, since i don't have a lot of time to study during the week. but if i can keep this up for the next year, i'll take my mcat in june and then apply this summer, and then i can relax a tiny bit for the next year, and just keep some extra curricular, and finish up my classes. since i start studying the mcat in january, i need to set aside 20 hours a week to study, so i'll be getting rid of my ER shift, and TAing, which gives me 14 hours back, and then somehow i've got to come up with the other 6. we'll see. i guess i can do anything for a year. med school is probably going to be easy after all this. yeah right.