It seems that I really took a hiatus from updating my blog. And for the most part, I haven’t done much writing since the last two years – since medical school happened. The only writing that I have been doing lately has been technical and it’s not fun – at all.
Remember these two that I met on my first day of med school. Two years later we are still going strong.
To summarize the last two years:
I’ve maintained my streak of being the first in class throughout the last two years and I scored straight A’s in the second and fourth semesters with a 4.0 GPA! Talk about classy! I also gained a massive amount of experience working in clinical, diagnostic, food, microbial and research labs. The next step is pharmaceuticals, environmental and a bit of taste for the agricultural side.
I’ve also started posting on my YT channel frequently updating it. I mostly talk about science and research over there but on and off I post answers for questions that people ask me on Quora.
My entire year was focused on Cancer Research and it is one of the areas where my interest has grown rapidly. However, I’m also looking towards the prospect of graduate studies in neuroscience and working on projects related to infectious disease as well.
One of the projects that I’m involved with deals with AGEs which are compounds in our food that lead to cancer. I explain about it in one of my vlogs
I’ll be updating the downloads section of this site because I feel that the assignments that I make for school should also be available to other students if they need some guidance.
Be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel. I’ll be updating the blog frequently from now on. I hope you’re all doing well. How was your year with ‘rona at large most of the time. let me know 🙂
With the beginning of new year started my journey into medical school and boy I was in for a surprise.
Not only is the teaching methodology different, but the entire perspective of how ‘Engineering is the most difficult of the disciplines of natural sciences.’ fails miserably.
I remember my first year of Engineering School like the back of my hand, because well, I failed in Differential Calculus in my second semester. FAILED in Mathematics. I had never failed a course in my life, let alone Math cause I was a really good and hardworking student. To fail that course was a blow to how I saw myself as a student.
Not many people can actually explain Math in an easy to understand manner or in a way that people retain interest afterwards. I am still able to do that. But back then, I was a blank slate. In fact, I was a glass slate and no amount of ink would stick on it. I couldn’t understand that level of mathematics at seventeen years of age.
My other subjects included basic English, basic Physics which also included some new concepts of Vectors that seemed to elude my understanding every lecture in the class, basic Computer Science and of course a lot of Math and Electronic Circuits – A course that I abso-fricken-lutely HATED! And of course, we choose a final year course to study in the first year because duh, and I got an A* on that – Applied Aerodynamics.
Most of the courses included some pretty big, hard and fast concepts which were needed to be understood. Once done, the mathematics relevant to those concepts was to be applied in areas and numerical reasoning and interpretation was essential to a successful understanding of problem solving.
All of that *points at the above paragraphs* included very little to no reading at all. We had a very limited text coverage heavily relied on mathematics. So, if you’re bad at numbers, you’re already screwed.
The other thing was lack of expertise and support. Teachers would give tasks and projects were assigned where we had to physically build up stuff from scratch and that stuff should work in order for us to pass the semester. As students from first year, this was the most challenging part that we went through. No teacher guided us or explained how presentations are made, what mistakes we’d run into, etc etc… In short, no one told us the basics. We had to learn it the hard way, by fits and starts. You either make things work or you fail the course, there was no in between. Also, we would automatically fail the course if we were absent 6 times in a theory class or 3 times in a lab.
We had three exams (25 marks each) every month out of which the best two were selected and a 30 mark final exam at the end of the fourth month. The remaining 20 marks were distributed in projects, quizzes and assignments.
This was me when I started engineering school at seventeen back in 2007. Waqar was one of the first friends I made at engineering school. He’s now a QC Engineer in Abu Dhabi.
Me (Left) and Waqar Tahir (Right)
This is me thirteen years later, entering medical school, this January.
From Right: Hashir, Me and Fahad
Hashir was the first kid of the batch, present on the day when I entered the hallway. We became friends since then and this was a good start. We’re both Headboys of our departments and there’s a healthy competition with us VS the entire batch kinda feeling.
The course load is immense and never ending. We’re studying a lot of different subjects that have in one way or another linked with each other as the coursework has progressed.
Some of the books that I have to study everyday.
But the best part is how exams are taken. We have exams every Friday. Our semester is divided into 18 weeks. Split it into two we get 9 weeks each. After 8 weeks we will have a midterm. And the next 8 weeks will culminate with a final examination.
The Friday exams consists of viva that questions our understanding of the topics taught in that week. And every week the students get to know about their performance, giving them a real time view of whether they are actually studying or wasting time.
That’s the least of our worries. There are NO written exams, which hereby completely eradicates the rote learning or lack of language skills. All papers will be based on an objective best choice questions. And all questions will be scenario based. Which means if you’ve got the concept, you now have to learn how to apply it.
But that’s not over. We’ve got compulsory extracurricular as well. Something that was not present at my engineering school. We could only play football because we were men and women could only participate in arts. It’s nothing like that here. I’ve joined both the literature and creative arts societies as well as a health club that involves students in activities which enhance their experience in the relevant niches.
These past four months have been nothing but a blur. I wake up at five, study all day, and then go to bed. A bit monotonous but I’m happy. I’ve got my brothers and Hamza to talk to and I’ve got a feeling of satisfaction and peace. And tons of photos to capture and make memes out of them.
Here ‘s’ ‘p’ ‘d’ refers to atomic orbitals which are tiny homes for electrons to live in!
There are still 4 more years to go though. This year doesn’t count, I’ve already used my cheat code IDDQD and IDKFA (from DOOM II that only 90’s kids will remember). I never thought I’d be going back to school at 30! 😀
Unwritten 