A very wise doctor once told me "if you didn't have OCD going in to medical school, you will when you come out." And it is so true. We all have some OCD tendencies to help us get through medical school, or they might have been what got us into medical school in the first place. One of the key ways we keep our sanity through the craziness that is medical school is by organizing things. Even though of us who are completely disorganized most of the time have some kind of study organization that they swear by. Most often it involves at the very least yellow highlighters and a blue and red pen.
Sometimes it gets a litte more advanced. Seven different colors of highlighter, all of which have a different highlighting purpose. Yellow for important details, blue for new topics, green for words we haven't seen before, pink for drugs, purple for diseases, and orange every once in while when you can't figure out what color something should be.
You can move up from there to colored pens. Write things in different colors to signify different levels of importance or different pathways. Purple for enzymes, green for activators, red for inhibitors, blue for substrate, black for product.
Even if you type up all of your notes,you have it organized some way. I like to make tables, and then have tables within tables, and bolded things and underlined things and italic things and sometimes, if it is really important, it will be bold AND underlined and possibly in all caps. Microsoft world becomes the bane of your existence because it won't let you organize things the way you want, and the autoformating it does makes no sense. I used to spend more time making the tables then actually learning any of the things in the tables I made.
I remember deciding to stop typing my notes because I wasn't actually learning, and go back to writing. But my blue red and black pens just weren't enough. So my mom bought me some colored pens online. The day they were shipped to my house was like Christmas day in my sad little world. Twenty fine tipped pens of different colors, in their own carrying case that also served as a stand. Oh the power. The next day I went to class, pulled out my new pens, and felt like a queen as everyone came over to look at and admire my pens. I even let some people try them. I had people threaten to steal my pens. And in fact, when I would leave my backpack someplace (because I randomly just leave my stuff everywhere), the first thing I would check when I came back to it was that my pens were still there. Who cares about the wallet, computer, car keys etc in there. The most important thing was my pens, and I would have freaked out if anyone had stolen them. One day one of the guys in my class pretended to steal them. I looked straight at him and said "Listen, I'll let you live for a lot of things, but I will kill you over those pens." And I was dead serious. Lucky for him he gave them back.
Beyond pens and highlighters, there are whole worlds of organization to make the crazy in all of us happy. Why, there are sticky notes of all sizes and colors, there are index cards, there are index card holders, there are file tabs, page markers, calenders, day planners, white boards, and a whole other array of things you don't actually ever find a use for but are convinced you need.
It is a sad day when you realize the office supply store is your happy place. Really? My life has come to this? But there are just so many amazing (and practical) things that you can find in there. All arranged in a very organized way so that when you are going in for pens, you can compare every type of pen available and make sure you are getting the right one, and then you can remember you are completely out of tape, and now that you write in pen you should probably get some white out, but pick up some pencils because maybe you'll switch to those, and what are those new nifty organizer things? What?! Three ring binder rings without the binder?! What is the magic? I can keep things together without carrying a binder around? Oh happy day.
You soon realize that not all pens are the same, and in fact you can only write with one specific type of pen. Or if you can use more than one type of pen they each have different functions. Your every day pen, your really important notes pen, your colored diagram pens. It got to the point where I was one day frantically searching through my box of pens and asked my neighbor if I could borrow her pen for the rest of class. She looked at me and said "you have a box full of pens." I couldn't explain to her that none of those pens were for every day note taking, and so I couldn't possibly use them. They'd be ruined. And I soon came to find out that sometimes I couldn't borrow a pen from someone else. How they could possibly use that type of pen was beyond me, but I sure as heck couldn't write with it. And so borrowing a pen became as difficult as finding the same type of pen that my best friend uses at a different office supply store (of note, our favorite pen brand stopped selling the pens we loved best. It was a tragic day).
I look around my study sometimes, now that I'm not doing classroom learning anymore so don't have a need for all the sticky notes, highlighters, pens, pencils, binders, etc, and I kind of miss them. I still hoard them, because maybe one day I will need them, I don't know. I still have twelve different piles of sticky pads, and am always in search of a sticky note to write something on. I'll sit and study and say to myself "if only I had five different colored highlighters right now, I'd be so much more organized and smart."
It's a sad, crazy place that a medical student lives in. Even those of us who never thought we'd become this have in some way become like this. Whether it's that you HAVE to take a new pencil from the front for each exam and cannot return it or ever use it again, or you have to sit in the same spot every day, or you can only write with the sharpie pen, or you have to have everything at ninety degree angles on the desk, we all have our little bit of crazy.
And if you haven't become OCD yet, you will. Just wait and see...
No comments:
Post a Comment