Tuesday, October 4, 2011

I didn't know lectures came in that format

Action Potential did a series about how crazy the lecture slides were at medical school.

Here is my rendition.

This is an actual slide from lecture:
To be fair, at least 25% of the slides had pictures on them. But the other 75% in this lecture were just straight text.

While you were learning glycolysis, did you think to yourself, "Man, I really wish I had all these reactions written out in words?" Well, if you did, then you would enjoy our lectures. Because that is what we get for 50 straight minutes.

But now you are thinking to yourself, "Oh she's just being melodramatic, I'm sure her written study guides / syllabus (whatever you call them) were really good."

Here is an example of our hierarchy in our syllabus:

I. The Anomeric Carbon (several pages)
II. Disaccharides and Polysaccharides (several pages)
III. Proteins react with carbohydrates (several pages)

Alright, doing good so far...

IV. The enzyme addition of carbohydrate can be either modest, even a single sugar, or massive, as in the case of proteoglycans which can be as much as 95% carbyhydrate.

Wait, what? Is that a complete sentence in place of a header?

Yes, yes it is. Let me elaborate on the full text encompassed by Section IV:

"Aggrecan is an example of a proteglycan."

That's it. Then we move onto Section V.

V. There are two major types of carbohydrate linkages: N-linked to asparagine and O-linked to serine or threonine, but less commonly on residues such as hydroxylysine in collagen

And this time, there is no actual text after that heading. We simply move right onto Section VI.

To change gears a bit...what font do you think of when you think "MEDICAL SCHOOL"?

How about some Calibri action? The default for Windows computers?

Or, maybe Times New Roman? After all, doctors are supposed to be scholarly.

But nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

Every. single. lecture. EVERY. SINGLE. LECTURE. is presented with:

Oh the horror! Anything but Comic Sans! Make it stop!
Why don't we just use Jokerman font instead? Please, make my eyes bleed more.

Yay or nay? I definitely think life and death with this font.

Oxidative phosphorylation has never looked so fun!

Okay, I can deal with all of the above. Microsoft has a neat feature that replaces all the fonts. I can ignore the lack of pictures and teach myself from established, well-written textbooks.

But the final straw was this week.

One professor presented us with a video. Of herself. Clicking through her slides. Instead of giving us the slides as a PowerPoint or PDF.

When I asked her if we could get slides or a PDF, she shook her head saying, "Oh no, I can't do that! A PDF takes up too much space!"

Really? Really? Bigger than A FREAKIN MOVIE?

For those who aren't computer savvy (it's okay, I still love you), you can almost certainly assume that a movie will be larger in size than a PDF. By a lot. 

So the end result is that we have our lecture format as a movie. With no possible way to get notes other than to screenshot every single slide and paste it into a document. But don't worry, Professor, I have plenty of time to waste doing that! I wouldn't rather be eating, sleeping, spending time with my husband, studying the other bazillion things I need to know, shadowing a physician, going out to dinner with friends. 

Oh wait. I would rather be doing any of that than mindless tedium.

But then again, this professor also used words like "Correctomundo" and "Okeedokee"...

*heavy ragged breathing*

*breathing slowing down*

*zen-like countenance*

But I'm not frustrated. Not one bit, no siree bob. I'm going to go do some Yoga, bbl.


  1. I also hate comic sans. with passion. if I were a murderer I would kill it first. funny post. I enjoyed it.