Block Weekend 1

Break time...

Its block weekend which essentially means the weekend before a huge test and I have no life. In case you don't know our semester is separated into 5 blocks with an exam at the end of each section (or block). For us first semesters our lab exam for block one will happen on monday morning and its a bell ringer. For those of you who have never heard of a bell ringer consider yourself lucky! Pretty much you have one minute at each station and you have to look at whatever structure they may have tagged on the cadaver or X-ray and figure out what it is and answer any question they ask about it. The questions range from what is it, to what does it do, to what muscle/nerve/vein has the opposite function to the structure that is tagged. These exams can be tough unless you really know your stuff (and we have "learned" the entire lower limb at this point), it means i'll be spending lots of extra hours in the lab this weekend. Then when your sixty seconds is up you move to the next spot and if you didn't figure it out in time then too bad because there's no going back. We had a mock exam thrown by the upper semester lab TA's (teaching assistants) which was great, it gave us all a chance to try out a bell ringer and become familiar with the feeling of being under pressure in the lab. I didn't do too poorly but thankfully I have a couple days to improve. Then after the bell ringer we have another two exams on tuesday for our histology lecture and anatomy lecture. Its going to be tough! Theres so much information for all of the classes but i'm definitely not alone.

Our class has a really great sense of community here because we are all far from home and we are all going through the exact same things. I've never been around a group of people who is this diverse and comes from so many different backgrounds but we are all united in a common goal... to get through this program. Its a very cool experience and I am very lucky to be around the people who are a part of this group!

 

I know that there are already plans in motion for some pretty cool post block activities (diving, hiking, swimming, not studying... for at least a day :) ) and so now I need to get back to studying so that I can enjoy those activities guilt free! I'll leave you with some pictures of a birthday cake I made for my fantastic new friend and classmate N.... I never want to make another cake without modern baking tools, we don't even have big mixing bowls, I had to use our large pot (never mind making the icing)... but it was well worth it and was pretty darn tasty!

Yes this is what the sunset looks like every night here...I pretty much live in the most beautiful place in the world (except for BC :)
)