This is (for obvious reasons) the first time I'm celebrating Thanksgiving but, no kidding, I have really felt the urge these days to reflect on and remind myself of all the things that I'm thankful for. I'm happy to be spending the break with the family of a person very special to me, in their home in South Carolina. I'm lucky to have that person in my life; I'm also thankful for all the amazing people I got to meet in the latest months, as well as for all the special people at home that I've kept in touch with (including my friend from home, Elina, whose birthday is in a few hours)! I'm also extremely relieved to have had a seemingly infinite amount of time to sleep during the break. Believe me - I needed that sleep.
I'm thankful for a "shitload" - as Luna very accurately described it - of other things as well. Like, for example, that this semester is coming to an end, with just over three weeks left until Winter Break, when I'm going to travel back to Greece. No, I'm not implying that I haven't enjoyed myself in the past months - my first semester at Davidson, in college, has probably been one of my best 4-month periods of my life; it's just that I've gotten way too stressed as far as my classes are concerned. I am doing well, but at the same time I feel that choosing such a "hard" curriculum for my first semester was sort of a mistake. Organic Chemistry (in which I belonged to the minority of non-premed students) I was happy to take - even though it was challenging, the material was way too interesting for me to care. But Calculus III, with the endless graded homework assignments that took up so much time, and the fact that it was an 8.30 class I accidentally slept through a couple of times and often struggled not to fall back to sleep in, was painful. I am ashamed of myself for saying that, 'cause Mathematics was always one of the most intriguing subjects for me, but I'm SOOOO looking forward to next semester, in which I won't have to take any more math classes.
I'm sorry to be bitching about my work in a Thanksiving post. But the fact that it's Thanksgiving break and I have free time is partially the reason why I am publishing this now. So, I'll go on, to describe something I'm really concerned about, and which has actually gotten me really angry for a while. If you take out our Writing Class, which is a freshman class, all of my other classes are mostly filled with upperclassmen, who are a "weee bit" more acclimatized to the academic curriculum of Davidson than we, freshmen, are (that's OK, so far, after all, it was me who chose to be in those classes). My Chemistry 201 class also happens to involve a "shitload" of premed students, most of whom seem to me a little too uptight and competitive. Well, as I try to keep an open mind, I usually don't want to make generalizations about such things and, to be fair, there is a particular sophomore pre-med girl in my class (shoutout to Shannon, please!) who seems to know her stuff better than anyone else, and yet is always approachable and kind should someone ask for her help. But the feeling I've gotten from almost everyone else is the "Leave-me-alone-I-don't-even-care-what-your-name-is-I'm-pretty-sure-I'm-doing-much-better-on-the-reviews-than-you-because-I-work-on-every-single-excercise-on-the-book-and-you-don't" look.
Like, seriously? I don't mind my academic environment being competitive, in the sense of having competent classmates who are striving for excellence (If I did mind that, I wouldn't have decided to come to Davidson in the first place). This encourages me to be better as well. But there's a good kind of competition (what I just mentioned) as well as a bad kind of competition. There was one day I met with my assigned study group to do a "group practice review" that would count some points towards one of our Chemistry reviews. While we were solving a problem about reaction mechanisms, I asked the group a question about where exactly a particular arrow's start and end points should be correctly placed (I won't explain the question here, as it gets unnecessarily technical), so we all searched the book for a similar example. After we found out that the position of the arrow's startpoint did have an effect in general, but not to an extent that was crucial for the answer to the review's particular problem, I got the comment, "It would help if you weren't so picky about such things!"
Well, I'm sorry, then! I'm sorry for having learned that one has to be precise in what they say, especially when it's related to science. I'm sorry for not considering it sufficient to give a vague answer, hoping that "the professor" will know "what I'm trying to say" and give me the points! I'm sorry for caring about Chemistry more than I care about a freaking grade on a review or an MCAT report card!
I'm sorry if I'm being an "angry bitch", complaining about my problems with my classmates here, on a friendly Meow! blog. But I'm not really angry at the particular girl who made that comment, or at every other student I see being uptight and unwilling to talk to any of their "competitor" classmates. If they want to be bitter, let them be and, although I personally gain energy by seeing people smiling and being positive, I can always turn around and find such people just around the corner. The problem is that, it's a fact, medical school is competitive, and for one to get in it, one must excel academically. Sadly, for some people, GPA is all that matters, or all that should matter, if you want to stand any chance at getting in one of those schools.
Sigh... I just wish more people went to college to learn, just for the sake of learning itself. Work for their future as well as enjoy the present, because after all, one never knows what the future holds. To return to the Thanksgiving spirit, I'm so grateful to be studying at a liberal arts college and to have so much to choose from in terms of academic (and non-academic) disciplines. Next semester, I'm going to give Antropology a try; I'm also going to enroll in a Music Composition class, which so far has only 5 students, and about which I'm very excited! What more could I ask for?
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