Rhymes with Orange

My Suitemate, Jainika, took this incredible photo at Grand Anse Beach.

 I am getting my keister kicked in school right now. Based on the learning strategies I am working on, I should be studying pretty much all day, everyday. I think their technique is interesting enough to share with you and may even help a few of you out that are still in school. Plus I eat, sleep and breathe this stuff so there's really nothing else to talk about. :)

Step 1: Skim material that will be presented to you in lecture. This is probably the most important step yet the easiest corner to cut when crunched for time. It makes sense that it is the most important step because seeing an outline of the "bigger picture" helps you take in the smaller points your professor is trying to make without scurrying to take every word he/she says down on paper. It also allows you to ask questions in class to combat any material you may be struggling with. This step should take about 45 minutes per class. All you need to do is look at the titles of sections in the chapter, any bold or italic lettering and take a peek at the end-of-chapter review questions to see what information is likely to be tested on.

Step 2: Engage in active learning during lecture. Get plenty of sleep, take organized and thorough notes, participate and ask questions. Also, bringing a water bottle to class has been proven to increase learning retention and test scores. Your brain is 80% water after all! Lectures are usually about 50-80 minutes.

Step 3: Review the material within 24 hours of lecture; less than 3 hours after class is ideal. You will retain more information from the lecture if you review it immediately! Make it your own; combine your notes from class with your notes from the book highlighting items you feel are most important. Create diagrams and tables of the information you don't understand. This is the longest step and should take as long as you need to have accurate and efficient notes for your test review. Create flashcards if necessary.

Step 4: Weekend weekly review. Go over the set of notes you created for all the lectures you had that week. The more material you can review each weekend, the better off you will be. Since you have already gone over this information three times by now, you should be able to go through this step in about an hour per class.

Step 5: Review for the test. This should be as simple as jogging your memory with major terms and processes that you've learned. By now, you have seen the material 5 times - the recommended amount of times it takes to truly retain something in your long-term memory.

For those of you visual learners out there, here's an illustration of what I just said. :)

Okay, okay. Enough with the geeky stuff. On one of my study breaks, (my DES counselor recommends 5-10 minutes of mild exercise for every 45 minutes of studying), I decided to take pictures of my daily commute for your viewing pleasure. It starts in the Veterinary Surgery Lab (MY FAVORITE PLACE!) and goes all the way home to my dorm.  In an effort of full disclosure, some of the following pictures are stolen from my friends' Facebook pages for you.

Proof that Vet students are cooler than Med students:

Legitimately, the exit signs in the VSL. 

Laughing.

These people sell food right out of their Toyota Previa van at lunch. I hope I'm never  so low on time, that I can't walk the extra 50 yards to the student center... Desperate times call for desperate measure, I suppose. 

The view from the top of the Campus Mountain.

Just when you think you're done there are more stairs to climb.

Above the ginormous staircase leading down to my dorm on the beach.

Said ginormous staircase. Look closely, people. It just keeps going and going and going and going....

Ahh... finally home. View from my front door step. Life's rough.

I stole this from my friend, Kristin. This isn't on my walk home but it's on my commute to the library!

The commute to the library is amazing. But I walk it like I'm on death row ...

...because this is the library. NOT so amazing. Wah, wah, wah.

This is a picture I took on one of my much needed study breaks. 

Sunset by the library fountain.

Not only do I have 2 exams and a huge paper due this week but midterms are just two shockingly short weeks away.  The stress kind of makes me want to run into walls, so I am desperately searching for a healthier outlet. While eating lunch in the student center the other day, I discovered how other medical students handle the impending doom.

Hilarity ensues...

I've been missing my doglet EPIC amounts lately especially since he was the BEST at making me forget about my stress. Apparently, he has been a gigantic troublemaker back at my parents' domicile. Jumping on the counter, digging to Grenada, cleaning his dirty paws off in their fountain, creating forts and tunnels in their bushes (searching for a different route to Grenada?), setting the alarm off at night; the list goes on and on. How could MY perfect little angelic Levi be capable of such things?!

So, naturally I asked for proof. 

And proof is exactly what I got.  You gotta give him credit for trying to wash up before dinner...

Leviathan Leviticus Mattiaci Del Monte! I am SO disappointed! Luckily I have incredibly patient and kind parental units who haven't sent him to a hungry Vietnamese family... yet. In fact, they're spoiling him ROTTEN.  Ingrid sent me this picture the other day of her Granddoglet's first cow joint from Lawrence's Meat Co.

Levi, could you try a LITTLE harder to look like you're miserable and missing me? Yeesh!

Pretty sure I am going to come home to a dog that looks like this:

Wait for it...

BAM! Yeah,  he'll even change colors from all the table scraps.

But in all seriousness, I am lucky to have such supportive parents. They have all done SO much to get me here. Taking care of Levi for me while I am in the dorms is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. How about a virtual round of applause? 

No? 

Okay then... moving on. 

Now the part I know you've all been anxiously awaiting. Drumroll please...

I SAID... drumroll! Why do I gotta do all the work while you just sit there?

This week's Fruit-of-the-Week: Citrus × sinensis

I totally wiki-ed that. It's just a fancy term for your everyday orange. But here, it's GREEN. Does that make ANY sense to you? A green orange? I don't how or why they REFUSE to make it orange, (there are ways, I'm certain of it!). I bought a bunch of them at the campus farmer's market this week. They taste the same, smell the same, look the same on the inside except they have gigantic pesky seeds that act as total speed bumps to your typical consumption experience. Here's some pics of the ones I bought.

See, they're green on the outside and orange in the middle. Weird, right?

Breakfast this morning. They sell these quartered watermelons at the farmer's market on campus which make the most REFRESHING snack in the middle of a hot day in September!

If there is one thing I have learned in Grenada it's the calming power of a good sunset. It sets about a minute later than the day before everyday. I love how reliable it is. We lose daylight early, around 6 or 7 at the latest,  which is still odd to me since I am used to warm weather being associated with daylight till about 9pm. Speaking of weather, we are having THE CRAZIEST thunderstorm right now. I have never heard thunder so loud! It shakes the whole building. Love it! Definitely NOT going outside... but still... LOVE IT!

Alright I gotta get back to the grind... If you want to receive an e-mail with new posts, plug your e-mail address into the little box in the top righthand corner of this page that says, "FOLLOW BY EMAIL." 

Ciao from the Caribbean!

"If you knew how much work went into it, you would not call it genius." - Michelangelo on the paintings in the Sistine Chapel