Perspective, or, "A Survivor's Tale," or "Post-Neuroscience Buffy .gif Overload"

A little over a year and a half ago, I broke up with my first "serious" boyfriend.  That was really hard.

Then, a little over a week after that happened, I moved to Hawaii for a year, a place where I felt the most isolated (both emotionally and geographically) I've ever felt.  That was also really, really hard.

However, something happened yesterday that made those two experiences feel like squishy little kittens of nothingness.

I finished Medical Neuroscience.

Oh, you don't think that's impressive?  Well, read on.

What is Medical Neuroscience, you ask?  Well, let's take a semester-long course wherein you learn about the entire nervous system and all of its functions and physiology and whatnot.  Sounds pretty hard?  Well, then you take that semester-long course and you cram it all into five weeks.

Yeah.

It was a really cool class; the material was wicked interesting and I learned a crap-ton about the brain.*  It's all so fascinating and brilliant, the way the nervous system works, and it gave me so much insight about the way my mind works.  However, I have never studied that hard for anything in my whole life.  I looked in the mirror one day and my butt was no longer there because I worked the entirety of it off.**  I clocked a ridiculous amount of time in the grad student study lounge, shutting myself away from all other humans (save my study group and two random Medical Sciences students who also lived up there) while I absorbed an entire textbook's worth of material.

I wish studying worked like this.

It was probably good that I stayed away from everyone though, because for those five weeks, grooming and all appropriate social demeanor just went completely out the window.***

This would have been right after the vestibular system lecture, I think. 

But seriously, it was so hard.  There were times when the whole thing felt incredibly overwhelming and I just wanted to die.

Sums up my feelings about the cerebellum pretty well.

But then there would be times when I felt like I understood the material really well and it was awesome.  At any rate, the final exam yesterday was a killer.  It was hard, but it definitely could have been harder which meant one of two things:  either 1) the test was just easy, or 2) all of my studying actually did something.  I'd like to think it was a little of both.  Regardless, it's over now.  I can't believe that it's over.  As I was leaving the test I thought, holy crap, I'm done with neuroscience; that was the hardest thing I've ever done.  So hard.  Of all of the things I was looking forward to about this program, this course was not one of them.  I'm a bone person, not a brain person.  I knew this class was going to be a killer, but guess what?  It didn't kill me.  I survived.

Of course, we didn't get our grades yet, so I very well could be jumping the gun with my very confident-sounding survivor's tale here.

*The fact that I now regularly use words like "medial lemniscus," "cholinergic basal forebrain," and "ventral-amygdalo-fugal tract" means that I have to balance myself out by using the words like "crap-ton."

**That's not true.  My butt is still there, and it looks quite cute in skinny jeans.  Probably because the stress of neuroscience cut my calorie intake down by a third while upping my metabolism by 15%.

***My current occupation is "post-neuroscience makeover."