Whew, that was ugly!

I survived. Yeah, one of those tests. I was pretty stressed all week knowing that a) I wasn't as prepared for this test as the first two and b) there was a lot more material on this one.

I had a group study session on Saturday with a couple classmates that went really well. I felt bad that I was the furthest behind. But they got me up to speed pretty fast. I even copied some embryo notes because the class notes were so disorganized I was procrastinating. Sunday I was able to dive into all the lecture notes and memorize a lot of embryology. I also spent a fair amount of time going over histo slides. I had spent a lot of time up to Friday evening on the upper extremity (arm) anatomy in the lab, drawing structures and outlines muscles and vessel groups so I felt fine on that part. This morning I spent four hours of last minute cramming. Going into it I felt stressed but hopeful that the questions would be reasonable.

Those hopes seemed to come true in the practical test. The upper extremity anatomy test was fair. I'm sure I missed a couple, but there were about 40 questions, so I should do ok. Likewise on the histology/embryology practical. Unless I fooled myself I think I did well on it too. The written tests (anatomy and histo/embryo) however were very different.

I started with histo and the first 10 questions were esoteric embryo questions that we barely covered in the last lecture. They never really tested the basics that we covered in the first five (of six) embryo lectures. Anatomy wasn't any better. Very few freebies like what terminal branch of the brachial plexus innervates the extensor pollicis longus. Many more were asking relationships that you just don't cover in lecture or lab like which muscles the median nerve lies between in the antebrachial region or whether it lies sup/inf/med/lat to the brachial artery in the cubital fossa. Yikes!

At least I had company. Walking out everyone had the same "opossum caught in the headlights" look which was a little comforting. There were enough guesses on it that I could get anywere from a 70% to 90%, maybe lower. One classmate had the best line of the 4-hour ordeal; "Don't worry, I'm sure it will be easier when we take it again next year".

The main thing is that it's over. Now on to metabolism for next Monday's exam. Friday's Human Behavior exam should be a 2-hour cram session the night before. Biochem will be harder. And I can't get behind. The test will be up to last Friday's lecture. So if I focus on it exclusively I'll be a week behind in Biochem and Anatomy! Learning to be a professional soft tissue computer is such fun.

To end this overlong post I should include a silver lining. I am learning how to organize class information better. That is where the group studying is really paying off. I waste time on disorganized studying. But show me how to organize the data in a timeline, flowchart or color-coded picture and I'm a 90%er - at least with this crowd. I like that this school is a little less competitive. If I did end up going to OHSU or another allopathic school, I think the hyper-competitiveness would be a demotivator for me.

So if any Pre-Meds get this into reading this post, my impression is that ostepathic schools are every bit as hard academically as allopathic and more expensive, but you get more attention from profs and have a more mature, less high-strung class.