Hoops? Think I like sports? Wrong!
I'm talking about the magical hoops, like the ones you see on dog shows on Animal Planet. The ones that every medical blogger I've read talks about. It seems they have to jump through 100s of them to keep going places. I don't know how I ended up on this road, but I'm here and this is my intended path and I'm going to follow it!
Before I begin in just a few months, I get to enjoy
the last few months of naive freedom here in the sad ending of my undergraduate years. To graduate, I have to finish up some general education (read: useless) courses. These classes are typically formalities. Classes that the institution makes everyone take because they give you "well-roundedness". This is the last time that I will
ever be able to rant about a non-medical class (I'm positive that said medical rants
will happen, and in great force, later on).
So I'm in this awful class called Communication Across Cultures. It is a class that serves as an alternative to the
:cough: mandatory
:cough: study-abroad program that my college so graciously
enforces offers. Basically, 50% of all students that go through here end up spending 3 months in a third-world country (Dominican Republic, Cambodia, Ethiopia...) studying and doing service. As much as I'm sure it would have looked great on my medical school application, I opted to avoid this experience, as my school tends to taint such things with its religious splendor. In retrospect, I'm glad I did not go; I hear largely negative reviews of kid's experiences, and honestly, I do not feel the need to do this in order to become a great doctor.
So this class serves as one of four classes that are "alternates" to this study-abroad program. Read: punishment for not going. They haven't been too bad, and one of them that I am currently taking is even
decent :gasp:! But this communications class is abysmal. Rock-bottom. First, it is taught by a stand-in professor with no teaching skills at all. This prof, we'll call her prof B, is standing in for the usual prof, prof A, who actually makes the class bearable. Prof B sucks at handling the class, and all 45 of us are painfully aware of it. We are treated like 6th graders. We meet every Monday evening, and let me tell you, every single time we meet, the thought actually crosses my mind at some point during the ~3-hour drudgery: "Whoa. I haven't done something like this since 6th grade!"
You know, she'll say things like, "Now...what is the definition of culture, again?" and wait for someone to
wake up pipe up and say the answer. We'll split off into groups of four and "discuss" things like "when have you felt advantaged/disadvantaged because of your ethnicity/class/gender?" We'll play little "games" to reinforce class "material" like dividing the class in two and playing the part of two different cultures meeting up. Her "lectures" involve her throwing up shoddy Powerpoint presentations and then elaborating on "terms" as if they were actual unfamiliar vocabulary (I think we know what "stereotype" and "prejudice" mean by now, lady).
The culmination of our semester involves doing an "Ethnographic Research Project" in which we identify some on-campus sub-culture and write an 8+ page paper on it. We have to interview and observe members of the culture and also do research on the topic so that we have viable sources. Then we turn it in and give a 3-5 minute presentation on it. She treats this like its a doctoral dissertation. She spends some time each week "addressing" the projects and making sure we know how to look up information and write a basic paper.
Oh, the headache, the headache. Make this useless class stop. Every time I see one of the other 44 kids in there around campus, our eyes meet and we exchange a "I know how you feel about this class too, it sucks" glance. Half the time we actually would stop and discuss how bad the class sucks, and I see other members of the class doing it around campus as well. It's like a secret "we all belong to this awful class" society. As with most other general education courses, I learn next to nothing and just go through the motions to get the grade and leave. This class is far worse than the others, though. This one, I actually learned nothing, and typing up this awful paper is something I could do any day, even back as a 6th grader.
Take-home message: I love all my free-time, and even the luxury of complaining about an easy-but-useless class. It will break my heart to leave this campus and the great people on it that I care so much about. But a much larger city, and bigger, better things await. Medical School countdown: approximately 130 days.
Graduation: I graduated from college yesterday (April 29th, 2007). A time for celebration, reflective thoughts, family, friends, and accomplishment! Yeah, OK. It was all that, but now it is over and I'm relieved because I can go back to sitting around and not doing anything while I await August. The count-down to when I move is at exactly 3 months now, putting the 2007-2008 school year well under 4 months. Scary to think about, seeing as I was a freshman here just yesterday.
