My Crazy Thoughts
my thoughts on various topics.

Had a dosage forms exam today. The thing about Dosage Forms is that he lectures for 2 weeks, and then a couple days before the exam he reviews last years test. While the topics are similar, the exams and lectures really don't have much to do with each other. So of course there is a last minute preparation. Because we don't really know what the exam is about until he goes over it. The concepts on the exam are a lot more complex than anything he covers in class. When test time finally rolled around today I didn't think I was going to ace it or anything, but I thought I had a decent handle on the information.
My response to the first question was, "Huh?" I got the next few. And as I continued to turn the page my one constant thought was, "Who made him mad?" Seriously I didn't study this. We didn't talk about this in the lectures. It wasn't on the old exams. Any of them.

Other than that things are finally slowing down. Time to take a break. Of course, the next exam I have to study for is a doozy of a biochem exam. All those metabolic pathways, 4 weeks of lectures. TCA, Electron transport, gluconeogenesis. glucagon and epinephrine inhibition of glycolysis, reaction thermodynamics, pyruvate dehydrogenase, all those complexes, all the different glucose metabolisms, the rest of glycolysis, more CYP450, glycogen, glucogon, and many moooore.

But as I was saying. Finally a little break. No exams next week. 2 presentations though, but for 1 I just have to make the powerpoint and then I'm done. And the next week I have that biochem exam, and then nothing else for the rest of the week, well, lectures, but that's it, and a brown bag, but then that's really it.

Tomorrow we are doing an osteoporosis screening. We won't being doing bone density, just risk factors, so hopefully some people will let us do it so we can get credit. I actually really enjoyed the first one (hypertension).

Last week I shadowed a 4th year. It was really interesting. I really enjoyed it, it really got me thinking about what rotations I want to do and whether I want to do a residency. I think I do want to do a residency, it would be really good experience, kinda being a real pharmacist but still aloud to ask questions and learn a lot because I'm actually working in the field. On the other hand, all the programs I have found ( which hasn't been many, who has time to research stuff that's not required?) require you to do clinical research type work or big conference presentations and stuff. I'm not really into that. So it's a toss up really. I think it really depends on what I want to do when I'm done. If I'm going to do retail then I probably won't do one. If I do hospital (which I'm now interested in because of my shadowing) then I will really start to look into it. It's so hard to get information here, I never know who to ask and when I do it's like they are too busy to give me anything other than, go here look at this. But it isn't all the information that I want.

I'm having a lot of problems pronouncing drug names. A LOT. Nadolol, metoprolol, propranolol. I can say propranolol except when I have to say it after the other two, which I can't say. I don't know why, it's a syllable boundary thing. Or a problem with which one gets an accent. I don't know. either way I can't say them, or really any other drug name. I'm going to make a great pharmacist.

posted by Malissa at 1:17 AM