Community Health Final Exam...

is OVER.

Thank God.

This also means that

all of my academic exams for the year are OVER.

Thank God.

My lowest projected score for this exam is a 79%, which means I should pass the class. Of course I'll never know until the grades are actually posted, but my hopes are high.

High enough to PARTY as though I've already conquered my first year of accelerated nursing at ivy1. The Wii party is on and poppin' at 6pm. Imagine drunken, tired nursing students trying to concentrate as they play Big Brain Academy or Cooking Mama Cook-Off! Or try to maintain balance long enough to swing a bat, roll the bowling ball, or hit the tiny tennis ball! I forsee hilarity in my future - especially since we're all delirious and high on caffeine from our all nighters.

I am so. friggin. excited.

The End of the Road

Tomorrow is the Community Health final exam and I am so nervous. The information is just so broad and random. As it often does when you've been studying for a long time, it's all running together. Why would the professor make the midterm over four units and the final over eight? And why can't she ever answer a question directly? I went to every class, I hope that puts me over the edge this time. On top of it our papers were due today and I handed in a mess. I have some hope because I've been turning in the same stuff all year and it gets me excellent grades and so just like that my own writing standards have plummeted. And then there's the fact that my paper was missing large chunks because I refused to put in plagiarized parts from my group mates. But of course I didn't realize they were plagiarized until the paper was due, so my paper was a little incomplete and lacked good flow. And (yep there's more) I left off three sources in my works cited list because I simply ran out of time. My friend asked for an extension, but I just handed it over so I could get back to studying for the final. It really was a mess...but I also thought my annotated bibs were crappy and I got a 100% on both of them, so here's hoping to at least an 80%, but I won't be upset if I don't get it.

It's the end of the academic portion of the year and I feel it in every bone and muscle of my body. This exam is a true hurdle. I have no room for error. I've decided that tomorrow I am going to party like I passed even though I wont know for a while...so tomorrow me and the man are throwing a Wii cocktail party. Everyone has RSVP'd which tells me that everyone else feels it, too.

By this time tomorrow I hope I can no longer remember my own name.

Pediatrics Final

I just took the final exam and I'm glad it's over. There were 50 questions, 15 of which through me for a loop. Let's hope I get a quarter of those right and therefore pass the exam. I had a small buffer so everything should be fine. I still haven't gotten my annotated bib grade, but that should help, too. But let me tell you what didnt' help...text message from my cousin at 1230 this morning! Mo, I'm kill ya! LOL It took me almost an hour to get back to sleep!!!

One more final to go, next week - community health. I can't wait to get this crap over with. I have no buffer, in fact I have a deficit to make up for.

Stress.

The Agony of THE WAIT

I took my two finals today, dutifully. Patho went (seemingly) well enough, but Maternal Newborn, on the other hand, felt disastrous. I hate studying so hard to still have to wonder if I passed a test. We covered a semester class in 6 weeks. I think that's beyond accelerated. And what's worse is that the objectives that are supposed to help you study for the exam are useless because they simply outline every bold heading in the textbook...it's unreasonable to expect that kind of memorization. But I'm not going to get up on my soap box today. I'm just going to say that I am worried....even after having started studying for this exam well over two weeks ago (right after the midterm!) Only 65 questions for all that material...I took the full two hours, and still wasn't really sure of my answers...I said I was going to stop, and I am, because what can I do about it now? Nothing.

Anyway.

I added two new blogs to my roster. I added Battle Axe because I realized I've been reading her lately, and I enjoy her sense of humor, her frankness and her willingness to post about being in nursing school and a (single?) mother. Here's a post of hers if you wanna chek her out. And also "Brown Graduate Student" which is not the real title of the blog...the real blog is by a girl named Cathryn Blue who is earning a PhD at St. Louis University (she says all this in her blog). I have been reading this blog since it first began months ago. I learned about it from some online article about the "first minority graduate student blog" which I thought was interesting because so many of us have been bloggin for such a long time...but anyway, she is in the humanities(?) if I remember correctly, so it's a different kind of graduate school experience from another brown (black?) girl in the world for you non-nursing folks considering graduate school. Her blog is quite good because she sticks to the topic, is insightful, and consistent. This first page of posts is a good example, I think.

This is the last week of Maternal newborn clinical also...which I somehow neglected to ever comment about. A pre-midwifery student's first maternity rotation deserves its own post, so I will give it that respect later...

We have been assigned our community health rotations for the summer and I will be staying local and working at a primary health care clinic. I asked for, begged for, Planned Parenthood, but of course I didn't get it...I still think there was some non-randomness to the whole selection process...I ended up at a site with two other brown people...can somebody get back to me on the probablity of 3 out of about 10 available brown folks (out of a class of 80+) all getting placed at the same clinic? I mean, really, what are the odds? Whatever. It's a 3 week rotation, and I can do just about anything for 3 weeks. But before this rotation starts, I have Pediatrics.

I hope it's better than I am imagining it will be.

Biomed, In the Final Hour

The mornings of exams I used to listen to encouraging music while studying. I had my IPOD programmed to play 4 slower, encouraging Gospel songs (think, Yolanda Adams) followed by a Hip Hop anthem-style song (think "Survivor")...I actively study during the slow (20 mins) then take a break during the fast (5 mins) and keep going for about an hour or two. Well, since my IPOD was stolen last semester, I haven't been able to do this. But this morning I came to school and listened to Yahoo radio while I studied. A minute ago, a song called "The Struggle is Over" by Youth for Christ came on; there isn't a song more appropriate for how I feel this morning as I prepare to take this final BIOMED exam. I've reached that place where I can't even be anxious about it because I just want it to be over. No matter the outcome, the stress of it is now over. It's like the peace you get after making a decision.

Hearing the song was one of those "And this, too, shall pass" reminders, and we all need those.

Semester One is Finally Over

The semester has ended. FINALLY. I basically slept (and read) from Thursday until now, with the exception of a trip to the grocery store yesterday to prepare for this hibernation I am about to go into.

Thursday was my final Med Surg exam. At one point, in the middle of test, I flipped the test over to calculate how many I could miss and still get the grade I wanted on the test. I didn't do it because I wanted to quit, but because I was feeling really overwhelmed by it all (hardest friggin test I've ever had in this class) and I needed some perspective...For example, I only needed a 60 on this final exam to pass the class...and even if I had of gotten a 90 my grade would still have been only a "Pass," (one of the things I hate about "Pass/Fail" system) then I figured I could miss something like 40 of the questions and still get what I needed...all of sudden the 14 questions I did not know the answer to didn't mean a damn thing and I kept moving.

Shortly after the Med Surg exam, and right at the end of a end-of-semester meeting with the program director, our professor came back in and made an announcement that although one person failed the exam, no one failed the class. We didn't lose one student this semester. It was a great feeling and the class, even if only for one moment, was unified and proud.

As tired as I was, I still took the Anatomy final afterwards (even though we had another 5 or 6 days to take it) because I wanted be done with all of this when I finally went home. I passed that, too, and that marked the end of the semester for me.

The semester didn't exactly end the way I wanted it to (I wanted High Passes), but it's over now and I can say I've learned something - a lot, actually. And despite the belief of some that we all have equal access to being successful here, I maintain my opinion that it is harder for some us than others. My view is not a popular view to have in an ivory tower because people are very uncomfortable with their privilege. But I know, because of how I feel right now, that it has been no small feat to come through this fiery first semester and although I might have suffered some smoke inhalation, I have not been burned...and I find that nothing short of miraculous.