By some amazingly lucky twist of fate, I had no school today. Those who are familiar with my timetabling woes should understand that this is probably the single greatest thing that's happened to me since my discovery of No-Doz and getting into med school. I've been gloriously sick for the past few days. (From doing laps at a public swimming pool. Pure-- albeit disgusting-- irony.)
After scraping through the most asinine details of acute inflammation until about one in the morning, I pulled up my ever changing timetable to check which god foresaken lecture would be owning my ass in the morning. The timetable is empty. I immediately freaked out, thinking that something was wrong. This has grave implications, damnit! What if I've been using the wrong timetable since Monday?! Have I missed compulsory classes?! AM I GOING TO GET KICKED OUT?! So I re-downloaded it, only to find that the fresh copy had a blank Friday. Everything else seemed to be in order. What was this devilry?! Was it a trick to see which students would have the balls and dedication to call up and confirm?! And then show up anyways?! Surely someone else would have realised in advance that tomorrow was a free day and trumpeted it from the rooftops? A three day weekend, for chrissake. Three. This couldn't be right.
After scraping through the most asinine details of acute inflammation until about one in the morning, I pulled up my ever changing timetable to check which god foresaken lecture would be owning my ass in the morning. The timetable is empty. I immediately freaked out, thinking that something was wrong. This has grave implications, damnit! What if I've been using the wrong timetable since Monday?! Have I missed compulsory classes?! AM I GOING TO GET KICKED OUT?! So I re-downloaded it, only to find that the fresh copy had a blank Friday. Everything else seemed to be in order. What was this devilry?! Was it a trick to see which students would have the balls and dedication to call up and confirm?! And then show up anyways?! Surely someone else would have realised in advance that tomorrow was a free day and trumpeted it from the rooftops? A three day weekend, for chrissake. Three. This couldn't be right.
Boyfriend:
What time is it? [groggy]
M:
Do we have school tomorrow?!
Boyfriend:
What? Of course we do? It's one in the morning?!
M:
THE. TIMETABLE. IS. EMPTY.
Boyfriend:
... [suddenly very awake] Huh? What?
M:
THERE'S SOMETHING WRONG WITH THE TIMETABLE!
Boyfriend:
Oh my god, what the ****?!
Eventually, we concluded that it must have been some glitch and boyfriend agreed to give the student consultant a call tomorrow at 7:30am to see what was happening. What if we actually had very important, life-changing classes scheduled? What if some students didn't get the MO and ended up missing out on what we might later recall as the greatest day of our medical education? ("What if we do have a free day? Should we do something?" "Don't plan ahead! If it turns out to be wrong, we'll be devastated. Devastated.")
I tried not to get my hopes up too much but I was already making plans in my head. There was the huge backlog of dirty clothing that needed to be laundered, the kitchen needed to be restocked, my notes needed printing and binding, my room desperately needs cleaning, the car needs petrol...
It's hard to believe that four days back at school can throw you off so much. This should probably be A Very Big Deal Pertaining to the Wellbeing of All Medical Students and thus dealt with as such but, honestly, it'll only piss me off. I take things seriously by default but if it means acknowledging the sheer amount of crap that comprises my medical education, it'll only make me bitter. I'd rather just laugh at it. The internet's already inundated with proactive med students bitching about med school-- many of whom can do it far better than I. Perhaps I'll throw my two cents in one day, seeing as my school goes out of its way to appear as though it's anything but conventional. Ba humbug.
3 comments:
wow medical education must be really different over there. half the people in my class never go to lecture
It is pretty different, as we do scenario based learning (which is a total euphemism for disorganised, tacky and poorly funded teaching.)
With the lecture attendence, it's mostly because the exam notes and documents are held hostage in the form of hard copies-- they release them at lectures and ONLY LECTURES! They call it "incentive". I call it "blackmail".
Sick from a swimming pool? Hope you are feeling better now. Clearly my coffee with a friend doing a phD in micro yesterday rubbed off - my first thought was "oh no, Crypto!"
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