In one corner sits a person ashen faced, staring into nothingness. Perhaps a slight streak of drool traces their chin, but they are dead to the world.
In another someone sits face in hand, sobbing uncontrollably. Their body shudders with each stifled wail as on-lookers stare.
Yet another person is merely wondering aimlessly about the room. Mumbling incoherently, a kind passerby offers a consolation of candy and is greeted by an indifferent stare.
What is the connection between these three individuals? They're all pharmacy students!
If you want to discuss an up and down roller coaster of emotions, talk to your nearest pharmacy students. For every high you there is a stunning low which is soon to follow.
At no point do you catch your breath and often you find new depths to your own personal despair. It's like being punched repeatedly in the balls, helped back up, and then be hit in the same balls with a jackhammer.
And then be pissed on by a bunch of angry elderly women.
Truly, it's amazing. If I were in any other situation, I would think there is something mentally wrong with myself. Eventually, such as days like today, you reach this insanity driven breaking point when you incessantly giggle. As if nothing in the world matters and everything is hilarious.
And here's the best part... this isn't the worst of it. Not by a long shot. That threshold is still a year or so away.
No time to wallow in the depression tonight, yet another exam awaits a mere 38 hours away. And let me tell ya, I truly am excited... and by excited I mean three seconds away from bashing my head repeatedly into a wall.
Good times.
5 comments:
People put too much emotional investment into pharmacy school. I can't imagine it's any worse than any other real professional university program. I'm a P2 and I've been "studying constantly" (not really) for the past 4 days for different subjects but I know I'm wasting a ton of time. People just need to be more efficient and complain less.
Then again, I'm saying this after downing a couple of beers to take the edge off of learning these 150 structures before Friday... so what do I know?
Phathead, I'm hoping beyond hope to embark on the same path as yourself within the next year. It's funny that this post should follow only one day after you posed the question about being overly cynical about pharmacy haha!
I can't give you advice from specific experience, as I've not been in pharmacy school, but I can tell you that it's TRUE that if you focus on the "endpoint" (as in the specific, sole reason you're doing what is causing you distress) than you experience some relief. Just imagine the PharmD after your name, and all the things that you care about being included with that.
I've been following your blog for a short bit now, and enjoy it immensely. I check it regularly. If nothing else, take solace in the fact that you are improving the lives of your readers here. Good luck to you.
Well tonight we royally had our asses kicked by a test that was unlike anything we had been given prior. It was at least somewhat warranted.
lol second year was the hardest for me and most of my peers...good luck!
I have to laugh.
I'm 20+ years past graduation with first pharmacy degree. It took a good 5+ years not to wake up in the middle of the night fretting and agitated about an exam the next day of on a jillions of Krebs cycle type mechanisms of action and monoamine neurotransmitter-type derivation pathways to memorize within the next three hours, papers due, kinetics problems, and a graduate thesis to write on a topic that I hadn't even decided to research. Panic attacks.
The second professional degree was less stressful, as it involved more professional meetings with others I already knew from my job and talking with patients which I'd already developed some degree of expertise.. Although it required a great deal of memorization of therapeutic regimens, at least I knew something about pharmacy by then.
When I went back the first time, I'd always tried to keep up to date with lectures right after class and avoid rote memorization of anything, but I remember a winter final that I went into after 3 days without much sleep and my head was so dizzy I had no idea of what I put down on the answer sheet (and not caring much at all).
The incessant giggling persisted a for a while after the first real job when I'd get a call from someone who thought I was the answerman, and had what seemed a genuine puzzlement in their voice (like me after studying for days when thrown completely off by a a basic question). Believe, me the questioner's problem frequently was not hilarious, but I was struck by the ridiculousness of a situation that we sometimes get ourselves shoved into, that the fact they were calling me for advice seemed a farce. Little did a caller know that the first time I'd encountered that particular question, and what had transpired at the time.
A slow-learner, I'd dropped out of pharmacy school for five years after the birth of my child, and when I returned to finish, I was full-force motivation and spared no expense in 'doing the time' (studying). The second degree I actually documented the time I spent studying at the pharmacy library on a calendar. That degree represented literally thousands of hours in studying, at least 5,000. The degree was visual proof.
Advice: study, study, study, don't try to get out of it, but that's advice for slow learners.
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