Health Science Reviews

by Julia Boland

When writing this and looking back on this year, I’m realizing that there are a lot more core experiences than I’d have thought. I feel like a reflective piece typically starts off with a few challenges, you add a positive spin, and then end up with a revelation. Well, I’ve had my fair share of challenges this year, but finding the positive spin may have been the hardest.

Entering into this year I wasn’t nervous, I was ready. This was the course I had been looking forward to, dreaming of, since I first learnt about what a neuron was two weeks into first year psychology. I was ready to learn, ready to engage, ready for a challenging year but ready to really push myself. I sat at home over December and imagined staying late in the library reading research papers and going through lectures, learning things that would completely revolutionize the way I thought about things now, and desperately wanting to share what I’ve found out with my family, my friends; since that is what university has been for me. You have no idea how ready I was.

What a year it has been.

The general techniques course definitely catered for a preferred group of science students –students from biochemistry, genetics, and microbiology. Now, coming from a background of human physiology and psychology, I really did get the new learning experiences and late nights in the library I was hoping for, as a lot of the time it felt like I might as well have been in a lecture on engineering. This meant I had to get creative! Having to find a way to “twist” the guidelines/instructions of assignments to steer the learning experience towards something that I could even remotely relate to really did allow me to exercise parts of my brain that I would not have been able to otherwise.

Within the Neuroscience course, a large portion of the coursework was a repeat of what I learnt last year (having come from UCT), which was great as I didn’t really have to learn many new things this year at all. Knowing or being familiar with most of the information allowed me to focus less and was pivotal in driving a decrease in motivation – it made me
especially eager to put in much more effort towards all things unrelated to my course.

I also gained a few skills over the course of the year, although, not from the techniques course like we all thought we would (believe it or not, you can only squeeze so much into a 20-minute visit to an MRI machine). Instead, the disorganization taught me how to be flexible when things changed last minute, the patchy communication helped me learn patience, having things in the exams that we weren’t taught helped me learn acceptance, and unconfident responses to queries allowed me to feel comfortable with feeling uncomfortable.

The course also promised a lot of free time, what could be better? And this promise was kept– the lecturers even spoke a mile a minute to make sure they would fit everything into the one-and-a-half-hour slot for that day. I think the purpose of the free time was to engage more with the content ourselves. And some lecturers actually went above and beyond to help with this, by devoting extra time to going and removing the text from the lecture slides before sending them to us, leaving only the beautiful pictures. This did work though, as after spending the lecture frantically trying to take photos of the slides with writing, we went home and spent hours typing it all out again. Looking back, I think this really helped with engaging with the content, and trying to figure out what text matched which picture also turned learning into more of a (laborious) game than a task. But it wasn’t all fun and games. Throughout this year a challenge I’ve faced is trying to reignite that excitement for learning, and I really do pride myself on being able to do that even when the lecturer’s sighs before presenting each slide kept blowing out the match.

Within Neuroscience you were either guided towards wet lab work or neuroimaging. I didn’t fit in either of those. Fortunately, my project – on the perception of sleep – different from the others that were offered, was really what saved this year for me. Even though it was a mammoth task, the interest it sparked in me reminded me of why I enjoyed research and that there are things within the field of neuroscience that are meant for me, even if the course didn’t specifically cater for them.

Overall, I think this year was definitely unexpected, and I think I’ve learnt a lot, made a lot of great friends and core memories. I had to find ways to overcome challenges, get creative when it was called for, and persevere when I really didn’t want to. Would I do it again? I don’t think so. But I am glad I did it, as it taught me where I belong, where I do not, and where I want to be going forward.