Emery [bxb]

90

I'm told the first year of med school is the hardest. I have mostly science courses, which means a lot of memorization. There're also OSCEs - Objective Structured Clinical Exams - wherein I'm presented with various hypothetical patient scenarios by an actor playing a patient with a certain clinical disease, and I have to obtain a thorough medical history and physical examination in the allotted time period.

The hardest course is gross anatomy, which has two components: an hour-long lecture and a four-to-five hour lab. It covers aspects of the human body like the cranial nerves, brachial plexus, mediastinum to the femur, humerus and orbicularis oculi muscle in your eye. It's fuckin' tough. I go from feeling overwhelmed, to panicking, to running out of energy, to no longer caring, to getting my shit together, back to feeling overwhelmed in a perfect cycle. Studying with Emery helps me keep up.

We're taking the course together with histology, the lab portion of which consists largely of looking at slides under a microscope.

In pathology, we look at histology slides of things like an infarcted heart which we learn to recognize by inspection.

Biochem is like organic chem but better. It's primarily lecture-based, so we have to memorize the Kreb's cycle and glycolysis cycle and such.