First day of medical school

Well here I am, in medical school, sitting with all the other proud, privileged and most wonderfully earnest kids, heads up, shoulders straight, eager and bent to march down the road of selfless utility.

During orientation, I went through the usual meet and greets with everyone I met. Most people are so much younger than me, it's too depressing to inquire. I comfort myself that people usually have to ask me 20 questions before figuring out how nontraditional I am. It's all good though, we are all on the same path, though some of us are getting started a bit later.

So far, my school has done a great job of being welcoming, of being friendly and inviting. All the faculty and staff were smiles and cheers, hiding their gruffness for the sake of not raining on our parades. Just kidding, I don't know if they were pretending or not, but so far everyone has been uniformly nice, which, is truly pleasant.

But aah, we come to the first day of medical school. I arrive about 30 minutes before classes start (atypical of me, but hey, i'm in medical school!!) and I prepare my notebooks as is, I fold my hands and I sit primly to await for instruction. The professor started off congenially enough, giving us a run through of what to expect in the coming days. Very quickly though, it is clear to me that I am not going to just "play" at being a student. No siree, the message is, I will study and I will have to study damn hard. It is even more clear to me that I will have to do so simply to keep my head above the water, i.e. pass my classes. He proceeds to lecture for an hour on biochemistry, this hour being the equivalent of about 2 semesters of chemistry and biology in college. It's basically like being assaulted and battered by a tsunami of information in the biomedical sciences. And I have about 989 more lectures to go. =)

So here I am, blogging happily about my first day of class and already feeling psychologically behind. But that is no matter, I will plow on, I promise. Stay tuned!