Biochemistry Exam: 1 -- Julie: 0

Phew. It’s over. That’s all that can be said about last week. I apologize for the lack of posting, but those pesky exams just got in the way. Because not too many interesting things happen when you’re holed up in the library all day, I thought I would post a few statistics from last week. Keep in mind that last week was the fifth week in a row in which I had an exam, and it was the worst week by far – exam in methods and midterm in biochemistry, but to be completely cruel, the biochem exam was split up over multiple days, so after taking a completely taxing and mind-numbing exam, we all headed straight back to the library to study for the other parts. Definitely not a fan.

All numbers are for the five days from Sunday evening (10/23) through Friday afternoon (10/28):

• hours spent studying in the library: 29
• hours spent studying in apartment: 31
• hours of sleep: 18 hours in own bed; 0.5 hours during oncology grand rounds (oops)
• ounces of diet coke consumed: 124 (significantly less than others in the program)
• number of medical students who encountered my stressed-out wrath when loudly discussing their whorish sex life in the middle of the library while I was trying to study enzyme catalysis: 1
• number of other students who yelled ‘thank you’ across the library when I bitched out the medical student and told her to take her social life elsewhere: 6 verbal thank yous, a few others just applauded
• times chapter on enzyme catalysis was read before I possibly understood a single mechanism: 7
• number of times I muttered “I should have gone to medical school”: 394
• number of times I was jealous of all my friends in the working world: 23
• number of times I kicked myself for not using my BA in Political Science to get a normal job on the Hill: 7
• number of times I contemplated getting appropriate paperwork to drop out: 4
• scary dreams about protein attacks: 1
• number of times I spent calculating exactly how poorly I could do on the biochemistry exam and still have a 3.5 at the end of 2 years of classes: 4
• number of minutes wasted calculating minimum grade which could have been spent studying: 30
• tears shed over biochemistry: surprisingly 0 (that will likely change once the exam is handed back)
• number of times best friend stated he was worried about the state of my mental health: 2
• mornings I contemplated just sleeping through that day’s exam since I was just going to fail it anyway: 4
• number of bags under eyes by Friday morning: 3
• glasses of beer it took at happy hour with fellow students to get me a little overtalkative and tipsy following 18.5 hours of sleep over the past 5 days and consuming only ¼ of a bagel and ½ a peanut butter sandwich in past 24 hours: 3 (so pathetic)

So, you may wonder, what does a PhD student do to celebrate the weekend after the end of midterms? Spent the Halloween weekend dressed up as something completely non-science related stumbling from bar to bar all night and lying in bed with a horrendous hangover all day? Not quite. Catches up on all those hours of lost sleep? I wish (I have lost the ability to sleep in, and was up by 7:30 on Saturday morning after a mere 6.5 hours of sleep -- so disappointing). No, no, instead, the PhD student works on biostatistics problems (exam coming up in 11 days), spends weekend time in the lab running assays, works on a PowerPoint presentation for an upcoming lab meeting, and catches up on transformed cell reading which was ignored over the past week. Thus is the life of a graduate biomedical slave.