Utterly Exhausted

I keep foolishly thinking that things are finally going to slow down at some point, but they never do. This week was the worst yet. I have only managed to get about half of the week's reading done, and I didn't get any reading done for my MS class yesterday at all. Obviously, this is not going to be a fun weekend, and next week is not looking much better, unfortunately.

This morning's seminars were on neuropsychology and gait disorders. The neuropsychologist who did the neuropsych session came last year also. She was showing us the tests that they give to people to see if they have dementia. Even though we had seen all of these tests last year, it was really helpful to see them again. Somehow, I am just getting more out of seeing these things this year. I think it's because now I'm only 95% confused about neuro instead of a complete 100%. The second session was with Dr. Chemali, who gave us a neuro session on sensation last year. He didn't play Celine Dion for us this year, but we reviewed all of the spinal pathways, and again, it seems to all just be making more sense.

Our ARM session today was a follow-up to last week's small group session where we are ostensibly supposed to be learning about how to write grants. It was, to put it kindly, completely useless. Each group was supposed to give a brief presentation about the project they had come up with, and I volunteered myself and one of my none-too-thrilled classmates to present for our group. The presentations went better than I had expected, because they actually did generate some discussion. But all in all, it was still a pointless exercise in terms of its stated purpose to teach us about writing grants. I think I mentioned last week that you would always start working on a grant by reading the literature so that you knew what the problems in that field are, which we didn't do. That's a pretty important step to just skip over! We were just coming up with hypotheses and methods out of thin air, which doesn't really give a very realistic simulation of the grant-writing experience. This exercise really should be made more structured, if not eliminated from the curriculum altogether.