“No, wait— it’s at least a C+!”
— Me, every time I catch a sea bass.
Hey, so it’s been 2 months since my last post, and needless to say, a lot has happened since then!
One change is that my family went from being a Nintendo-Switch-free-household to owning two Nintendo Switches and two copies of Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Yes, this is very important to me. I’ve been a huge fan of the Animal Crossing franchise for as long as I can remember. I started with Wild World on the DS, then played City Folk on the Wii, and finally New Leaf on the 3DS. I’ve even tried the GameCube version, despite that version being slightly before my time. (I am old, but not quite that old.) If a fellow ACNH player happens to be here, let’s play together sometime!
In other news (I think I stole this line from Isabelle), exam season has come and gone, and I’ve managed to raise my overall average to 90%! I will continue to work hard to maintain and improve my grades over the remainder of my degree. Hopefully. I wonder how much of my observed improvement was due to COVID-19, and how much was due to my own efforts? I will likely never know.
A further consequence of COVID-19 is that my plans for this blog have fallen apart. I’m not sure if writing a course review/outline would be helpful for most of my term 2 courses now, due to the unconventional online format and exam weight changes that occured. There are two courses that I think I can comment on accurately despite these changes, however: PSYC 315 and ATSC 113. Perhaps I will write posts on them in the future, when I have time between playing ACNH and prepping for the MCAT.
That brings us to the MCAT. Wow, wasn’t that a nightmare! Was anyone else up at 3am PDT refreshing Twitter? Of course, I’m referring to that fateful day— May 7th, 2020. I’m half-proud and half-ashamed to say that my first (and hopefully last) time pulling an all-nighter in my entire life as a student was to change my MCAT time. As luck would have it, I would be randomly assigned the 6:30am appointment. The only logical solution, then, was to stay up from 3am until 9am hoping for a chance to reschedule it to the high-demand 12:15pm timeslot.
Oh, except that the registration website crashed and didn’t end up going live by 9am as promised. You can imagine the frustration of us all (especially those of us not in the East coast). Thankfully, after ~26 hours of being awake, ~11 hours of which I spent staring at Twitter and the MCAT website, I finally managed to get that noon MCAT time! So it was worth it, I guess. I felt terrible the next day, but with the whole COVID-19 situation, it’s not like I had anywhere to go anyway.
Now with the scheduling part out of the way, it’s time to focus on the actual MCAT prep. I opted to take a prep course, which is starting in about a week. I went with the expensive route, rather than self-studying, because I don’t trust myself to stay on track… especially not after getting ACNH. I hope that this course will help me pace myself and learn everything that I need to learn in time for my exam in August! Time will tell.
Doesn’t the time seem to go by quickly, these days? Maybe it’s just me. It feels like my exams just ended, and yet… today marked the start of Term 1 Summer Session here at UBC. Thankfully, my course (CAPS 391) doesn’t start until tomorrow, so today was more of an extension of my rather short break. I think that I’m going to withdraw from the course, though. I do want to focus on my MCAT prep, after all, and taking this course doesn’t particularly benefit me. I think one important consideration when deciding whether to do a course in the summer or not, is the fact that some medical schools don’t consider your summer course grades in their GPA calculation. This could be a benefit (i.e., you might want to take a mandatory course that is difficult during the summer, so that it doesn’t tank your GPA), or a deficit (if you planned to take a fun/easy elective); but UBC is not among the schools that this applies to, anyway, so if your sole goal is UBC medicine, this is irrelevant.
In my case, CAPS 391 is not mandatory for my degree. The only reason why I signed up for this course initially was because it was a prerequisite for nursing. However, the more I think about it… I’m technically only in second-year still, and I have plenty of time to take this course in the future if medicine doesn’t work out for me! Plus, there’s still other options like PharmD and counselling psychology… I don’t need to impulsively take courses for the sake of qualifying for every single one of my many tentative career aspirations.
Similarly, I’m enrolled in MICB 202 for term 2 of the summer. Again, this is a prerequisite for PharmD. I’m not sure if I really need to take this course, but at least it’s relevant for the MCAT, I suppose. Plus, my friend is taking it with me and I would feel bad if I suddenly decided to ditch her. Luckily for indecisive people like me, term 2 is still a long ways away, so I can deal with this decision in a few months time.
I think that sums up my main points. There’s just been so much going on lately, and it can be overwhelming. Please continue to take good care of your health (physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, all of it!), and be kind to one another. Let’s all get through this together! 🙂
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