Health Science Reviews

By Yeuko Manganyi

It goes without saying that school is difficult, well, maybe difficult isn’t the best description but definitely challenging. The time, effort and mental bandwidth it requires is something that I think a lot of us in the honours group have had to grow accustomed to, all the way through undergrad to what it looks like now. Nevertheless, this pursuit for higher education can at times be overwhelming, frustrating and all consuming.

Honours has been nothing short of challenging, requiring me to become more intimately aware of my shortcomings not only in terms of what I know and what I am yet to learn but also as it pertains to how I go about the work I do, the way I convey ideas and how I put pen to paper with those ideas. These are personal challenges that have required me to grow as an individual.

Individual is the key word here, despite being in the same honours program,  our insight on the same experience is shaded by the differences that make us individuals. These differences inform things like our feelings, moods, proclivities and can even affect how we experience things.

I don’t know about you but as far as my thoughts are concerned, it does tend to be just me, myself and Irene. So, combining the demanding nature of the honours program with how individualistic our experiences and consequently our thoughts on said experiences, are can make for bitter work… or at least that’s how it appears on the surface

You see, despite all of this we are still in the same honours group and it is in this one thing we have in common that our humanness really shows. The work is challenging and sometimes a bit tedious, regardless of this I find that it in the little moments in between that have made my experience overwhelmingly positive. So to the friends I’ve made along the way, the laughs and smiles I’ve shared, the people I last spoke to in March, to our larger than life lecturers and the random conversations about why eating avocados is an ethical concern:

You are the Robin to my Batman. That’s to say not all heroes wear capes, but sidekicks definitely do.

PS. I didn’t really have a title for this but in case you were wondering. Its soFISHticated.