After spending a few hours looking through the course guide online, I finally have a tentative spring term schedule. My current course list includes: Organic Chemistry, Physics (electromagnetism, circuits, waves, optics, and imaging), Introduction to Psychology, and Madness and Medicine. The last course is meant to fulfill a social sciences requirement and so I will be learning about the history of psychiatry.
Although I am not necessarily looking forward to this spring semester, mainly because of the organic chemistry and physics class that I have to take, I am looking forward to the light at the end of the tunnel. Once I am finished with this semester, I am finished with most of my pre-med requirements! All I will have to do is finish taking my last two biology requirements, and then I will be able to concentrate on enjoying the courses in my concentration as well as finishing up cores. Even though the biology requirements won’t be easy, I feel that I would enjoy them more simply because they are related to biology instead of physics.
I am a little nervous for my courses because the reviews for them do not seem wholly favorable. Judging by reviews on the physics course, I will be spending a lot of time struggling through the material. Most of the comments were along the lines of, “Take this only if you are pre-med. But if you are taking the course, you probably are pre-med. It will be hard, but suck it up.” Plus, the professor for chemistry has changed this semester, so I do not have any reviews to fall back on.
When I voiced my concerns to my dad, he just replied, “There’s no point looking at the reviews. Just read ahead about the topics you will be covering in physics so you will be more confident when you have to learn the material.”
That sounds like a better idea than what I am doing right now. I guess I might as well go read about the fascinating subjects on magnets, electricity, etc.
Many people have different study strategies and habits. There are those who complete homework as they listen to music. Others manage to watch a TV show while completing a problem set. And still others complain that studying is boring and not for them; they cannot focus and eventually spend more time trying to concentrate and study at the same time than if they just sat down and completed the work.
As a pre-med student, I can say that studying takes up a sizable amount of my time. Even though I’m not always happy when I have to sit down to study when I could be doing something else more pleasurable and more active, I eventually find some sort of fun in learning new material. Or if anything, the prospect of failing will reduce me to a panic that will motivate my focus.
However, even though I try to be a good student, my study habits can be dodgy a lot of the times. They shift from pure procrastination to full-blown day-to-day study marathons. From this gigantic contrast, I can easily tell what works for me and what doesn’t in terms of studying efficiently and actually retaining information. From these experiences, I compiled a list of study tips.
- Find a motivation before you study. Many times, studying is long-term rather than short-term. In colleges especially, studying is usually related with tests. Many people copy one another’s problem set and neglect to actually learn the material until a night or two before the test date. However, this is unconstructive studying behavior. Much of the information learned will be fresh for the test, but gone a week later. This can be disconcerting when that material will be needed later on in your life (so pre-meds, make sure to study physics, chemistry, biology, and orgo chemistry early). Thus, I look at studying as the long-term goal of being able to retain new information better, which means that I can do less studying later on when I am scrapped for time. This thought process usually motivates me to sit down for that weekly three to four hours review session where I review what I learned that week and take notes. I make sure to write my notes as comprehensive as possible so that I only need to review my notes in the future rather than having to go through lecture slides or even worse, a textbook.
- Find a good study space. This step is very important. It sets the stage for distractions or helping you to focus. I find that empty, small tables are usually good study spaces. The lack of objects on the table besides my studying materials helps me to focus. I also like studying in the library because the milieu of other people studying motivates me to settle down and study too.
- Make sure there is no visual stimulation that will distract you. This means to turn off any streaming TV shows that may be on Youtube and close the Hulu window. If there is a shiny coin on the table that is distracting, remove it as well. Remove anything that could possibly become a deterrent to studying. I find that this step usually takes a lot of self-control, but once this step is over, everything becomes more easy. My mind will start settling down as I try to concentrate on what I am studying. The first few minutes will always be hard, because my mind is always on something else, but it will eventually start to focus on what I need to be learning, rather than what I want to see. Remember, studying is a need and does not have to be a want.
- Create a musical playlist that helps you focus. This step is not always the best for everyone. There are those who can only study in peace and quiet, but I usually like a little music to play in the background. This helps me to settle down and start focusing because I trained my mind to hear a type of music and get into the studying mood. This also helps me to not become distracted. For example, in the library, there are people who may be whispering or come in and out noisily; music cancels all this bad noise out and allows me to focus on my studies as if I was in an isolated system. When creating the musical playlist, it doesn’t matter what type of music is in the playlist. As long as you like the music, then it’s okay. There are those who can only study with ambient music, but I am one of those people who like catchy tunes interspersed with instrumentals.
- Study. It may seem stupid to write “study” in a tips list for studying, but it’s important. I found that as I studied more, I learned to be able to study more. I became increasingly better at focusing. When I didn’t study, I started to lose that ability. Thus, my winter break has been pretty much an unproductive period because my procrastination and laziness has only fueled my procrastination and laziness and made my studying skills regress. As with anything, practice makes perfect. In this case, practicing how to study will help make studying more efficient.
- Read out loud and slowly. I only use this method when I really have trouble focusing, but sometimes it helps to calm me down when I read a passage out loud and slowly. By slowly, I mean practically pausing word by word. Once I get a sentence out of the way, my mind is a lot more focused and I am ready to speed-read.
Although these skills aren’t 100% guaranteed to help jump-start your studying career, I hope that they may help someone out there to be able to focus more. They do seem pretty obvious and common-sense, but it’s amazing how many people complain about their grades when it is because they cannot study correctly.
So if you’re procrastinating, stop. Find that motivation to study and keep that in your head. Take away the distractions and focus. As you study, you may even start to like the material. There have been many times in which I had trouble focusing but once I actually understood a key sentence or two, I really felt as if I learned something and became excited to learn more.
Good luck studying!
The blog has yet another design change. Although I actually did like the last design, my sister simply abhorred it. In her words, “A two year old could have made that.” That may very well have been true, since it was so simple.
Hopefully, this design will stay for a while and will entice me to write more entries. The search bar is also finally back, so whoever would like to use that function may do so.
This design is made entirely with CSS and XHTML except for a header photo. I realized that I am not good at writing entries with pictures, so I might as spruce up this website with a photo in the header, just so the website does not look that bland.
While coding the design, I also discovered that CSS3 is currently being implemented in different browsers. That really made me feel old and behind; the last time I coded a layout, CSS2 was in the new thing. But I embraced the new functions. Finally, I could create a shadow behind a picture and create round boxes without having to use photoshop to provide picture edges. However, this function is only available in Firefox and Opera. Hopefully, Internet Explorer is not far behind in implementing CSS3 changes. They do make designs so much easier to create and much more eye pleasing.
If there are any problems with the layout, please leave your browser name and version in your comment and I will see to fixing the code.
I never really fully understood why the MD/PhD program at medical schools were so competitive. Sure, you have a full ride to the school. Sure, you get a MD and a PhD degree in one go. But, you have to spend twice the amount of time in school than if you just went for a MD program. So, I told myself I would just go for a MD degree. That would only take four more years after college, as opposed to the 7-8years of the MD/PhD programs at most schools. However, as I shadowed a neurologist today, I realized why a PhD degree would not be so bad.
The neurologist I shadowed worked at his own private clinic, so I basically saw him interact with patient after patient. He was really busy thus there was not much time between the breaks to ask questions or interact, but I felt like I learned quite a lot from my morning with him.
- The job of a neurologist is to observe everything the patient does. This can be as small as noticing that a person fills out a form very carefully to testing for memory problems by asking the patient to recite numbers. Basically, anything is game when diagnosing a patient.
- Anything abnormal should raise a flag, which may not be totally mentally related. Be sure to be knowledgeable about other conditions as well.
- Take all information objectively. This may sound easier said than done. We have seen this all on medical dramas such as House or Grey’s Anatomy where the characters stress the importance of listening to info objectively, but I found that when I listened to one of the patients have his caretaker tell information about him, I was influenced greatly by what the woman said. However, the neurologist later said, “You realize I have to take things objectively, so I’ll run a few tests.” I also heard from my advisers that one of the biggest problems right now for doctors is when patients withhold their information or only provide selective information. Doctors have the job of putting together a puzzle with missing pieces and other pieces in the wrong order.
- Being a good doctor is being about to cater to what the patients’ caretakers want. All the caretakers are usually very interested in knowing more about the disease, but some more than others. Be sure to provide enough information without boring the caretakers.
The doctor did not have any new patients come in besides one patient, but that patient already knew his illness. Thus, I didn’t actually see the process of diagnosing anything, so I hopefully will see that later.
However, as the morning went by, I realized how boring diagnosing or treating patient after patient would be every day for a year. Thus, researching is an outlet. Researching allows creativity and close-knit group interaction, which I do like. Also, instead of just diagnosing certain unclear conditions, researching actually allows people to try to figure out what exactly is occurring during each problem.
I definitely have to start researching soon. I have procrastinated way too much in applying for labs. I will be getting that out tomorrow ASAP.
Anyway, I might be shadowing an internal medicine doctor tomorrow, but that is if the weather is not horrible. If it turns out to be snowing, I will be shadowing next week instead.
Recently, I was working on creating a unique design for my Project 365 page as well as a new section titled Yingnaisms. I wanted to be able to add entries to these sections easily through the Wordpress installation I use for this blog, but I also wanted the two sections to act as separate websites. How was I to do this? I made use of Wordpress categories. For the rest of this entry, I will be discussing what I did in order to create separate websites through the use of Wordpress category functions, including separating the design of single pages. In other words, separating the design of an entry in Project 365 from my main Wordpress design. Any files modified is in the themes folder being used.
Step 1: Create your categories. I made a category for each type of page (Project 365 or Yingnaisms). Any entries related to either of those two categories would be filed under those two categories respectively. For example, when I posted a picture for Project 365, I would categorize the post under Project 365.
Step 2: Omit entries in the category from the main blog page. To accomplish this task, I used Wordpress conditional tags as well as the query function. I placed the following piece of code in my index.php file right after the get_header tag.
<?php if ( is_home() ) {
query_posts($query_string . '&cat=-125,-128');
} ?>
This code basically says that if the page is the home page (the main blog page), it will be display the posts except for any posts in the categories with ID 125 and 128. The category ID number can be found by going to Posts >> Categories and clicking the category in question. The ID number will show up in the URL. For example, when I click on the Project 365 category, I am taken to
http://yingna.yinten.com/wp-admin/categories.php?action=edit&cat_ID=125
The ID for this category is thus 125.
Step 3: Create and implement a design for the category page. Create a design for your category. Wordpress allows the easy creation and manipulation of category templates to create a template for each category with the same concept as the Wordpress page template. More information about Wordpress category templates can be found here.
The structure of the coding for this page will basically be the same as the index.php page and should be named category-ID.php. For example, I named the page category-125.php for the Project 365 page. The coding in the file should include a header, a query for the posts in the category, and a footer. Remember, the get_header and get_footer tags in Wordpress do not need to be used. Instead, I created another header and footer and implemented them directly into the category page.
Step 4: Separate the design for the entries in the category from the main blog design. When the website goes to an entry rather than listing all the entries in the category, Wordpress calls on the single.php file in your themes folder. Thus, in order to change the formatting of my entries, there had to be a code that first asked if the page was in the correct category and then redirect the formatting to another file or another piece of coding. In other words, I wrote this piece of code in my single.php file before the get_header tag.
<?php
if (in_category('125'))
include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/category-125.php');
if (in_category('128'))
include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/category-128.php');
if (!in_category('128') && !in_category('125')) { ?>
This code asks if the entry is in the category 125. If it is, the category-125.php page would act as the template for my entry. If it is not, it will read the next bit of code and ask if the entry is in category 128 and if it is, the category-128.php will act as the template for my entry. If the entry is neither in category 125 nor category 128, the rest of the code will be read and the normal single.php template will be displayed.
Notice that I included the same category-125.php page I had used for my main category page as the entry page. I was able to do this because the main page for my Project 365 website and its entry pages are very similar, so I just used the same file. However, make sure that your code is valid for both instances. For example, if I had a piece of code that would only be relevant for an entry page rather than the category page, it might output an error on the category page. In these instances, you can include conditional tags (is_category() or is_single()) or create another file to replace the single.php file.
Step 5: Create a comment template for the entries. Although you may be tempted to directly add the comment template code directly into your category-ID.php file, this does not work. The comments only show up when the code is being accessed from the comments.php page. In order to overcome this and not make the comments.php overly lengthy, I added a similar code to the one I placed in single.php to the comments.php page before at the very top:
<?php
if (in_category('128')) {
include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/category-128-comments.php'); }
if (in_category('125')) {
include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/category-125-comments.php'); }
if (!in_category('128') && !in_category('125')) { ?>
All the template coding for my comments will then be placed in the category-ID-comments.php file.
Finished!
Now, once all those files are uploaded, your category page functions basically separately from your main blog website but the addition of new entries are all from the one same admin panel!
