urops examinations...

So I'm down to my very last presentation for "Tropomyosin as an Important Class of Pan-allergens", which would take place at uh, 6.30pm later. I sure hope it wouldn't take 1hr20mins like the previous presentation yesterday, from a 15min examination time. Which, by the way, went pretty badly: It is possible to overprepare, and then just dump everything without thinking - very bad idea when the prof is a really smart guy and insists that you DRAW out whatever I was talking about which made me stumble for a few heart-stopping moments because now I had to provide more details about WHAT EXACTLY AND HOW would I go about carrying out further studies, which also saw me happily making several stupid mistakes about the protocol which thankfully I retained enough presence of mind to see and rectify quickly, unfortunately after it was pointed out to me. Sigh. Oh well, at least its over and he was really nice about it, although I'm quite sure he's going to give me a pretty bad grade over my apparent lack in visualising a study and following protocol blindly. Lesson learnt, though rather painfully I must say.

And after a night's sleep, I woke up, again, knowing EXACTLY why I made the mistakes - primarily because I mixed up a cell count technique recently covered in immuno prac, dot-blotting and my mind's original idea of how the experiment should be carried out. Go me. =X Add that to the nervousness over the exam itself and the prof's reputation for killing students and you get the idea. I wish I could just go to sleep whenever I cannot come to a conclusion regarding work - somehow I'd get the answers after 8hours of sleep. Unlike Kekulé and Loewi, however, the answers aren't in the form of dreams, nor are they particularly ground-breaking. (Great, I remember useless scientific trivia like this, but not the stuff in my notes for the exams.)

Anyway, chit-chatting with profs are always inspiring, I don't know why. Or maybe its because the profs I've had the privilege to sit down with are actually decent educators in their own right. People who erm, remember my module choices from a year ago might remember that I did both 6mc experimental modules, resulting in great damage to my CAP. I didn't like biochemistry and I'm quite terrible at it, but I decided to take the experimental biochem module anyway because I thought that taking a 6mc biochem module would make my life miserable BUT also ensure that my understanding of biochem would improve greatly under the circumstances (I suck but I want a good grade hence mug hard and taadaa understanding dawns). As it turned out, I took away more than that. Okay, I only got a B for it, which was quite disappointing, but I thoroughly enjoyed the entire process, on hindsight. The miniproject was so much more fun than 2202's - we were brought through several chromatography and gel techniques, then handed a rat's liver, instructed to isolate a particular enzyme from it and turned loose in the lab for 7 weeks. Every step was ours to decide (of course there were equipment limitations, for example, no affinity chromatography) and buffers had to be made from scratch. It was a painful 7 weeks, but it was enormous fun. For once, the direction of an entire experiment was mine to decide (with my group mates, of course) and we had to troubleshoot everything and rectify the mistakes or else, which I thought was incredibly enriching and exciting. And I thought that maybe research wasn't that bad after all. And then I did 2202 and I wanted to cry because everything was just protocol, there was nothing to think about. So I started slacking and I did even worse for it. Blah.

Moral of the story: if its too easy and you already know the answers, why bother doing it? Also summed up as nothing worth doing is ever easy.

Yes, I have digressed. My examiner yesterday was a great advocate of mistake-making, and while I agree with him, I don't particularly like being marked down during my exams because they do have an effect on my CAP. And after I pointed that out to him, he asked me "what's the worst that can happen? Does it matter in the long run? Does it even matter in the short run? At the most you just drop a grade or two! Does anyone out there give a damn about it? No!" And I wanted to say, ouch! In this system, every stupid grade counts, and every mistake can be fatal to your dreams. (And I don't feel like going into that, so I shall not.) But I really hope that they're right, and I'm wrong. At any rate, I feel quite confused - on one hand, I care, but on the other hand, I don't really. And on one hand I have never considered age as a restriction to my dreams, but I suddenly realised that I'd officially be in my mid-twenties in another 4 years and suddenly everything now has an expiry date and I don't have the time to do everything I want to do. I want to do science/study medicine, study overseas and see the world, hopefully publish a paper or two and have a part in the advancement of healthcare and treatment and influence the next generation of science people, but I also want to hopefully marry and have children and raise them myself. Blah. Why am I talking about this now?

Its 1pm. I should stop wasting my time on random musings and mug some stuff.