The third semester

It still feels like the semester hasn’t really started yet, but the last lecture prior to the finals, which will end this semester, is less than four weeks away – and it’s like that most likely because all the work wouldn’t let me look back at everything that has happened since the beginning of September. So let’s hope that I can recall all that was important.

Firstly: weird things happened all around. Not only did a group of people (or even a whole society) choose to live in the street voluntarily (yes, I mean Wall Street); a few inches of snow fell before October had even ended (I was curious about ‘inches of snow’, and I can tell you that it was quite unpleasant, suddenly as it came). The worst thing about this was that I managed to make the heat in our room work only afterwards, so I woke up into a very crisp morning for several days and could see my breath while I was still in bed (okay, I’m exaggerating – but I did dream about that several times in the early morning). As a result, the fall flu was just around the corner. But it left me very soon after I got the heat to work, having decided to turn that weird dial (which I never noticed before, of course!) with all my might. Since then, I have regularly fallen prey to my “thermostat fallacy”, which is still a low price to pay for my health.

As for my academic life, you could say that little has changed, save for my subjects. I still do my assignments like every other Columbia College student (philosophy for this semester), like every other pre-med student (biology and physics), and also like every other Neuroscience and Behavior student (Judgment and Decision Making) – plus I started considering international studies (outside the US this time), in France to be specific. So I also take French lessons now. What has changed is that the demands for pre-med courses are getting increasingly stringent – in other words, biology (and organic chemistry at a later stage) are subjects that divide the students into those who will remain MD candidates after undergrad, and those who eventually choose a different program (as the case is with anatomy exams in our country). I bull-headedly remain on the path that I set out for myself. Recently I added another motivation to complete it: I enrolled in a competition on the iDnes website where various people try to see if they can make the dream of their life come true by age 25. My goal is admission to medical school in the US, and as I received enough votes in the subsequent online poll, I made it to the finals. So now I “only” have to succeed in making it to medical school in the US to receive a year’s worth of decent pocket money.

The last important thing to mention is that I won my fight against the local bureaucracy and, though I’m an international student, I became an official employee of the lab where I had worked as a volunteer before. This means that I get remuneration for my work, so I no longer have to spend my leisure time on dubious activities that involve everything possible from saliva sampling to hopscotch to answering sometimes overly personal questions to inquirers whose intentions are unclear (I mean psychology experiments in the US where the principal research subjects are students of Bachelor programs in universities where the experiments take place). So I can focus more on things that are important to me.

My reflections above have just shown me that things are going exactly the way they should, and maybe even a bit better and more interesting. But I’m also looking forward to having an opportunity to take a deep breath, grab a book that I want to read, and doze off with it still in my hands. But that’ll be a brief moment only, as everything will start all over again soon.