Anyway, the big dog this semester is supposed to be neuroscience. I was a psychology major in undergrad and took some interesting courses (one in particular comes to mind, in which I lesioned the dorsal hippocampus of various female Sprague-Dawley rats to test their spatial reasoning), so I've got some familiarity with the brain. Nevertheless, the stuff I've just been reading through to get a head-start on the first days of class is as dry as a keg in a Colorado college town. I can't wait until we get into the agnosias and the aphasias - those are the cool parts of neurology, but until then, I've got to wade through a roadmap/glossary of brain-terms I like to call "neurobabble". It's a little worse than the fetal heart, except, instead of bulbus cordis and sinus venarum, I've got the falx cerebri, a little thing called the vermis, and more gyri and sulci than I can shake a stick at. But you know what? It's going to be great!
What's not going to be great, however, is the load of negative feedback that I feel is stirring off somewhere in the distance, waiting to swoop down upon my beloved med school like ravenous carrion-birds of darkness. First is the mess with the print center - I don't think I've found a more fitting definition of the word "asinine". Last semester, at the back of the main computer lab, two industrial-strength printers were manned by a few library employees behind a desk. These employees, however reviled they may have been for their inopportune and lengthy breaks, neatly stacked up the papers printed out by students, so that, at almost any time, we could go and collect the documents we printed. It was annoying at times, because if they were on break, no printing could be done, but I thought it worked. Now, the administration has seen fit to completely relocated the printing services to another building, accessible only by a teeny window, though which I must present my ID after hitting CTRL+P in the library and taking a lengthy walk. So now, all of that is behind glass - not to mention the staplers an the hole-punchers. Asinine.
Not as asinine (and perhaps downright unprofessional, let alone potentially devastating) as the fact that someone in some office somewhere e-mailed the entire 1st semester final grades which didn't match up to the letter grade. To make a long story short, some people checked their grades over the break, thought they'd passed, and didn't learn the heart-breaking truth until they showed up for registration, where they learned that all of their materials said "SEM 1" and not "SEM 2". I can't imagine how those people must feel - but what's even more difficult to stomach is that there was absolutely no communcation from the administration explaining the discrepancy in the grades. Shameless.
All of that is enough to get a fellow flustered - so I've been doing some Hatha yoga with Nicole. We've gone to two sessions of the Ross yoga thing, and it's honestly not that bad. I'm glad that things aren't so crazy right now, and that I can go to the gym, read a bit for fun, swim in the Caribbean sea (which I did for the first time with goggles the other day - absolutely breathtaking), and walk on the beach, snapping photos, like this one:
All complaints aside, I'm so lucky to be here. If I could go back in time and do it all over again, sure; I'd work harder and plan better. But I get a chance to work towards becoming a doctor, studying under amazing faculty, and do it all on a Caribbean island nation, with the beach a stone's throw from my room? I used to sit in my dining hall in undergrad, sip coffee in the morning and remark "Ahh...life is good" so often that my friends made fun of me for it - but that's how I feel right now.
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