There are better days...

I thought I could make it through the semester without getting frustrated with the Medical Sciences faculty...but it turns out I was wrong. Since the beginning of the week I've just been so frustrated with everything these people do and don't do. Maybe I should be grateful for their efforts, after all this is a new faculty, but I can't help but feel that they're not doing anything! I went to the faculty office to give them something that they asked me (the I.T. rep) to do, to find the secretary happily chatting on MSN and telling me that what I've been doing for the past 2 weeks for them was for naught.

It wasn't a large task really. I was asked to collect electronic pictures of all the members of the class (40 people) so that they can put it on their file. Mind you, this is nothing that I should have to be doing. Apparently they're too lazy to go to the Admissions department to get these pictures. And I practically had to hunt down some of these students for a simple picture. Gosh.

My anatomy lecturer...she's a very sweet lady...but she can't teach. And it's so unfortunate that she's our permanent anatomy lecturer. She's from India, and she has supposedly taught for 20 years, but it really doesn't show from the way she teaches. I wonder if it's just the language barrier because she seems to be convinced that she's saying one thing when she said another. For example, today she was doing a little review for our test on Thursday and she was saying that dorsiflexion at the ankle locks the knee. Huh? That makes no sense. So someone asked her about that. She's like "I didn't say that!" and then it turned out to be one big long debate over what she did or did not say. And this happens in practically EVERY class with her. Not only that, she doesn't let you finish your sentences and she answers your questions before you reach the 4th word. Ugh.

And then there's the fact that these people bring lecturers from the hospital...LOTS of different lecturers to teach us stuff and they all have different views. So when the exam comes around, these lecturers of ours don't seem to set any of our questions since it seems they never know when our exams are or what is supposed to be on them. They've been doing it for Embryology and Anatomy. And the same lecturer that I mentioned in the previous paragraph is the one who runs those courses, so she's the one setting the questions and she'll give us questions on what the other lecturers told us not to concentrate on. And that frustrates me so much! It just goes to show that there's is virtually NO communication going on within the faculty. Our last Embryology exam had questions about things that we've never been taught. Apparently those grades went up today so I'll check it out tomorrow.

We had over a month of Upper Limb lectures in anatomy and I think about a month for the Lower Limb. That's not right for a good few reasons.

1. the upper limb has fewer muscles than the lower limb to have to memorise
2. even though the upper and lower limb have the same number of compartments, in the lower limb the compartments do different things while in the upper limb it's all the same
3. the nerve supply from the spinal cord is much more complicated in the lower limb with more nerves to remember as well as what muscles they supply.
4. the foot has a heck of alot of muscles compared to..say..the hand, which by the way I STILL don't know anything about.
5. we're expected to learn about the leg (from the knee to the ankle) and foot in 2 lectures to be tested on them in the next week along with bone, joint and muscle diseases.

Basically, the lower limb is MUCH much more complex than the upper limb but we spent so much less time studying it. To be expected to know so much in so little time for ONE course is bad enough. But I've got lots of other tests around the same time too so that makes things even harder.

I hate how they pack all these tests in a week or 2 weeks. They've just been throwing tests at us since the beginning of October right up to the second to last week of lectures. There are 2 more weeks left till teaching ends and I cannot wait for that time to go. It also means I get to go to New York for Independence weekend and get some of my med text books and maybe a new phone! I would be so happy for a new one. I'd also be very happy for a new laptop as well since the audio has diminished by a little more than half since last week and I have to use headphones to hear anything properly.

I'm so tired of studying. And I'm so frustrated with our faculty. They just can't do anything properly! I understand it's the first year and all, but they should've been more prepared before they started the programme (I hear they've been planning it for years now...doesn't seem like it to me). We don't have our own building. We don't have our own equipment. We don't have anything that's ours! Not until next year...or so they say.

Ugh.
I feel much better now that I've typed out my frustrations =)