5 More Days.

So yesterday it finally set in...the sense of impending doom - exam is just around the corner. It has been a very tough revision period. It was particularly hard to muster up some motivation as it is quite weird to have an exam so soon (as I just had an exam in May). I think I'm still recovering from May's exam - it was brutal/traumatizing. Horrible experience.

I've spent about 6 weeks revising now, and I feel like I haven't really learned anything, which is an unsettling feeling. Worst bit is that no matter how much I study/revise, I am not going to know everything. That's the thing with Medicine, it's just a bottomless pit of knowledge. Give me another month, I'd still find something to study. Went to look at specimen papers earlier today - had a semi-realization. No book will teach you how to pass a clinical year exam. It seriously is common sense. I mean I went through a whole paper and I was like "...nothing I've studied has been asked." Then I realized clinical questions is the application of knowledge. Take the basics and apply it to the question. No book will teach you how to diagnose. It is a matter of taking what you know and putting it together to form an answer...like a puzzle. After 2 years of medical sciences, you forget that Medicine isn't about 2+2 = 4. It's more abstract and requires critical thinking and pattern recognition. And then I kept flipping through the specimen and seriously some of the questions they ask really deserves a fat: "What...?" And then you look up the answer in a textbook and find the answer in tiny fonts as a footnote at the bottom of a page. Seriously think some questions are put into exams just so it's impossible to get 100%. If anyone ever gets 100% in our exams I will personally go to them and bow to them. Then again I forgot how disliked my year is in the medical school so I'm pretty sure there will be questions on the exam where you just want to pick up the paper and throw it at someone.

Anyways...looking forward to end of exams and at the same time I am scared out of my mind for this year's exam. Ugh. ALMOST THERE!