Recipe for Revision

Here is a recipe to serve fledgling medical students - 

Ingredients: 

Lots of good intentions - because if all goes horribly pear shaped, at least you can say you had them. 

Plenty of paper and stationery - for doodling when your brain is about to explode. 

Instant Notes in Biochemistry - you're going to need it, especially if all those 8 am starts were a little too much to ask. 

One room from which you will not leave - other than to eat, drink, use the toilet, and to hyperventilate down the phone to your friends 

One punchbag or similar - a wall would suffice, particularly as the average student has neither the money nor the space in student digs for such stress beating luxuries. 

Painkillers - paracetamol, aspirin, ibuprofen, codeine, though not all at once - to be used in the event of overuse of the wall. 

A photographic memory. 

A miracle for those who actually believe they happen. 

Beta blockers (own prescriptions only - please, as black market propranolol is not a good idea before the biggest exams in your life to date). 

Teabags, coffee and lots of sugar. 

Redbull - "it gives you wings" 

Proplus - for when the tea, coffee or time begin to run out. 

Thirty hours in a day. 

Eight days in a week - that way you have time to eat and sleep, as well as revise. 

A vast selection of takeaway menus and a telephone to hand - if you cannot afford this, then several loaves of bread and a surplus of baked beans make an ideal substitute. 

A leaflet on stress management - although you'll be so stressed, you won't have time to read it. Generally stick to using the wall. 

Method : 

The week before the exams : Preset room to about 300C - with air-coolers, heaters or blankets, whatever required. Put all those good intentions to one side. Bored already? Take a trip to your friend's room and prepare a hot beverage, chat to your batchmates, then reluctantly return to your room. Finally open a book. The first topic seems so unfamiliar that you have to check the subject syllabus to make sure you need to learn it. You do (as is usually the case) spend a copious amount of time writing out perfect notes on the particular topic. Six hours have now passed and three pages perfectly condensed notes have been copied from the textbook. This is now the time to panic as you look back over the list of topics and slowly realise that the topic you have just spent the last six hours toiling over is one of 25 topics, all as gruelling and similar in complexity.

Telephone a colleague. He or she is just as stressed as you are and together you decide that perhaps three or four heads are better than one, and a group revision session may be your best sporting chance of cramming two years of information into a few days. 

Five minutes later your colleagues arrive with books and notes in hand. After spending the first half hour telling each other about how stressed you are and how everyone is going to fail, you start to quiz each other on things you've learnt. 

Arghh! Everyone else seems to know much more than you do. You decide that this public display of lack of knowledge is not going to help your exam performance, so continue for the rest of the week studying on your own, filling in chunks of missing or lost notes from 8 am lectures. 

The night before THE EXAM - By this time there are no nails left on your fingertips. You can't eat for fear of vomiting. Your notes seem alien to you. All you on do is sit and hope. An all night session is on the agenda, but you are so exhausted that you fall asleep at 2 am. 

To serve - 

Serve with a generous helping of blood, sweat and toil. Garnish with a handful of pencil shavings. 

The end result - 

Who knows, only time will tell. The thing to remember is that thousands of medical students undergo this cruel ritual every year (including myself), and most of those do indeed pass. Don't give up hope. 

Ritwika Kaushik 

Batch - 2004