How To Get Through Studying: A Sort-of-guide

In one week’s time I will be sitting the first of my final exams for this semester. And it sucks.

After the best 6 months of my veterinary career to date which included attending my first state and national conferences, spaying my first cat, seeing practice for 3 weeks at my local clinic, learning a huge amount of clinical skills and booking my trip to volunteer in India, I’m back to reality. With that reality comes stress, and my failed attempts to deal with it. So far I have re-hung three doors in my house, watched a season and a half of House M.D., cooked some incredible meals, and made half a dozen study schedules. Up next on the list is painting my bathroom and finishing the next six and a half seasons of that terrifically amazing medical drama.

I don’t know what it is about impending academic doom that makes me shut off, maybe it’s the hope that if I ignore it for long enough it will go away, or maybe it is a subconscious mechanism for avoiding stress, or maybe I’m just lazy. Whatever it is I know it’s bad and isn’t a healthy way to approach exams. But, is there a healthy way to approach exams? I’ve tried to figure out the keys in the past, and here is my best attempt:

Getting In

The morning I got accepted to Vet School is one I will never forget.

It was early January in 2011 and I had just recently gotten back from spending a few weeks with my grandparents in central Queensland on their fruit farm over Christmas.  After a few days of alternating between the pool and the beach, the holiday period was winding up. My diet needed to begin changing from prawns, wine, and mangoes back to regular food like ‘salad’ and ‘vegetables’…

The shock of being removed from this tropical paradise and my battles with travel fatigue meant that I spent the night before I received my acceptance letter I was fighting a battle between sleep deprivation and nervousness This left me in a zombie-like state, and I ended up watching Disney Channel re-runs until the early hours of the morning! Eventually I succumbed to sleep so deeply that I completely forgotten what day it was when I woke up – so I carried on like a normal holiday morning. So much so that I was sitting in my parent’s room saying good morning when my mother said off-hand:

“So Zach… when do you find out about whether or not you get in”

“huh” I grunted in my typical teenage vocabulary, preoccupied with thoughts of breakfast – and then it hit me! “Bloody hell! Why didn’t you tell me earlier!!! Oh  my god oh my god oh my god!!”