Oh MD3, How Hard Are Thou

I wish I can blog more often, but this semester there are times when I don’t even get a full 5 consecutive hours of sleep and it exhausts me because of the lack time I have due to studying.

If you talk to anyone who attend or have attended SJSM, they will tell you that third semester is the hardest semester out of the 4 semesters in Bonaire. The hardest classes for MD3 are Pharmacology and Microbiology. I compared the curriculum of both SJSM and ROSS and to my surprise Pharmacology and Microbiology are divided into two semesters in Ross School of Medicine. At SJSM, Pharmacology and Microbiology is packed in one semester and for that the third semester is EXTREMELY difficult.

At 8 AM we have Pharmacology, and it’s scheduled to end at 9:50; at 10 we have Microbiology until 11:50. From 12 to 1 we have lunch hour and afterwards from 1 to 2:50 in the afternoon we have Pathology I. From 3 to 5 on Monday we have Pathology lab from one half of the class, on Tuesday and Wednesday at 3 to 5 we have Psychology; from 3 to 5 on Thursday we have research methods, and on Friday at 3 to 5 we have Pathology lab for the other half of the class. So, now you have time from 5 PM to 8 AM the next day, to go home, take a shower, eat, rest and study for the 4 lectures of the day.

The classes are so difficult that you will see some students sleeping in class because they studied all night to catch up with the lectures for the following day. Honestly, not all students do that, some students don’t even bother studying till the weekend.

So you can see that it’s overwhelming and the worst part is the weather is humid and very hot. Once you step out of the AC cooled classroom you will start feeling the horrible humidity. However, you’ll get used to that from the first semester.