Last week was rough! I had an anatomy lab midterm the Friday before last week. Put everything into studying for it and surprised myself by kicking butt, especially on the cadaver part. Whaaat? Who knew the little stress case had it in her? Definitely not me!
I gave myself a break from studying Friday night but spent Saturday and Sunday studying for my anatomy lecture midterm until I could barely see straight. Seriously…roughly 20 hours of studying (around 10 hours each day). Honestly, it was more studying than I’ve ever done for anything…and yet I still felt iffy with some parts.
I took the test and felt that I had done well although I wasn’t sure about a few sections of the test. There was no time to obsess about it, I had a physiology midterm two days later and I hadn’t spent any of my time, aside from studying for the quizzes, studying for the midterm.
The quiz was 22 questions, 5 points each. We only had an hour and a half, or an hour and 45 minutes if you decided to skip going on your break, which I did. It was still hardly any time to answer all the questions very thoughtfully and my hand was cramping beyond belief. Oh well, no time to think about anything other than what the answers might be.
We had Thursday and Friday off, so after my physio exam a few of us, including my boyfriend, went out to play on trampolines. We had a ball! It didn’t matter that we were completely brain dead. It was nice to finally get out and do something fun…and active! When we finally finished playing on the trampolines, we went and sat down on some couches and took silly pictures. Somebody checked their phone and saw that our anatomy grade was up.
Want to see a bunch of PT students freak out and frantically check their phones? Tell them their anatomy grades are up. “I got a 54 out of 60!” one of my friends had said. It was a great score! Especially since she hadn’t spent very much time at all studying our last lecture on the foot. “Omg, the average for the class was 90%” I heard her say. What?? That’s ridiculous. Gone are the days where the class average was, at best, a 75%…this isn’t undergrad anymore…these people here are legit. I was starting to get nervous. I had studied so hard, and not just on the weekend, I had studied hard from the beginning. What if after all that studying I still performed poorly?
“I got a 44” my other friend said, clearly upset. It was a C and in PT school, a C isn’t somewhere you’d like to be. “I got a 46” another friend said. She was mad at herself. “I don’t understand, I study for 4 hours EVERYDAY for anatomy and I got a C?!?”. I felt bad for them. What an awful feeling. To work your ass off only to find it wasn’t good enough. Their grades only made me more nervous.
I sat on the couch with my boyfriend and quietly whispered to him as my friends talked about their grades, “what if I didn’t do well? I worked SO hard?” “You’ll be fine,” my boyfriend whispered back. I was still trying to pull my grade up on my phone. Why had I decided to check it here? We were having so much fun. What if it was a bad grade? I don’t want to look disappointed in front of my friends and bum everybody out. Too late, it was clear I was looking at my grades. I didn’t want to say I changed my mind and was going to wait until I got home, they’d think I saw my grade and was too embarrassed to tell them. Okay…here it goes…
56.25 out of 60. Almost a 94%. My friends were still too busy talking to see the smile start to appear across my face then quickly fade away. They had worked hard and didn’t do well. I had gotten the highest grade out of all of them. I knew they’d all be happy for me, but I didn’t want to rub my grade in their faces. My boyfriend, with his arm around me, gave my shoulder a slight squeeze and whispered a congratulations in my ear.
I was not surprised when my friends asked how I did. Awkward. I didn’t want to say my grade, ugh it felt so showy or something, I don’t know. I didn’t want to be secretive though, like I was weird about it. So I told them I was very happy with how I did and they all said that was all that matter. I don’t know, maybe that still seems a little too secretive? I just don’t want to brag!
Anyway, since then I’ve been checking my physics grade like crazy and I just found out I got a 95%!
And you want to know the best part of all of this? I didn’t panic during either test! Nope! I didn’t even think about panicking! Well, aside from maybe once during each test when I thought, “Holy moly, I am not panicking!” Sure, I got a little nervous before both of them and my xanax was on hand and ready to go, but once I got to class and sat through a lecture or two I was calm and ready to go! And no, I didn’t take the xanax.
So my first two midterms of PT school are done and both have been a very huge success. I’m so unbelievably proud of myself it’s ridiculous! To think that 5 weeks ago I was telling myself PT school wasn’t for me and that I couldn’t do it. Turns out, I think I can! 🙂
The Life of a DPT Student 