Nothing I say should be taken too seriously! by Benzi Samueli

(Disclaimer: Nothing I say should be taken too seriously or literally; I take a great deal of poetic license with everything.)

I know I have an upcoming exam in immunology, and if I don’t study harder for microbiology I’m going to fall behind real quickly, but I promised MSIH that I’d write these weekly blogs for a month. Plus I get a nalgene and gift card for this. So I’ll study a little later.

I got an iPad this week, which is very exciting and very useful. A number of students use the Notability app, which lets you import the lecturer’s slides and take notes right on them. Also, all of the textbooks are available in eBook format. All in all, the iPad is a great investment for carrying around all of the lecture slides, notes, and textbooks in a very small device. So when I start studying a little later, it will be on the iPad.

Another personal study tool I use is print-out review sheets taped up on my walls. As I walk around my apartment, I quickly look over amino acid structures and lymphocyte classifications. I took biochemistry in college, and I can’t believe I only just realized this week that phenylalanine is alanine with a phenyl group. The review sheets will be helpful a little later when I start studying.

Most of the professors are very kind in posting a lot of resources online. From Moodle (the university’s official class-resource platform) or their individual websites, you can find relevant articles, notes, assigned reading pages, etc.  I just received a couple of e-mails from biostatistics that some material will be excluded from the final, and also some explanations on the binomial distribution. Unfortunately, these e-mails are going to delay what was once a very timely study session, because I’ll need to look over them before I start studying a little later.

It’s getting late, so I should go to bed. I’ll wake up early to study. Uh-oh, the sirens are going off. One of the directors just sent the class a text message that it’s a false alarm. I discuss with my lovely wife Rakefet how the alarms can go off accidentally. I mean, in high school it was obvious - the building could just detect when we were taking finals and would go off all the time. Anyway, this defeats my early-to-bed-early-to-rise strategy, so I guess I’ll study tomorrow.

Correction from Previous Post: Unbeknownst to me, my lovely wife Rakefet has herself turned into a grammarian (as we say in Hebrew, להתגרמר), and told me that my pronunciation guide to the word octopodes should have included a ə.  - blogger of the month Benzi Samueli