hey blog-readers...

another week seems to have whooshed by... i really need to stop saying that! only got one more '6-day' week after which no more sat morning lectures! i thought it might be a good idea this time to run through what i've currently doing in each subject:

neuro:
at the moment we're doing the neuropsychology component of the course. it's really interesting, but to some extent it's more about understanding key concepts rather than rote fact learning (as the cam course seems to be labelled as being!)... we've covered neurobiology of emotion, and common psychiatric disorders like depression, anxiety and schizophrenia, which were all really interesting to learn about (though by the end of it all i was convinced that i was a paranoid, depressed schizophrenic)! this week we did some work on the neural basis of learning, cognition and memory, and revisited areas of the brain we covered last term (seems SO long ago!) like the hippocampus, etc (you'll all do this at some point!)

pathology:
we've finished bacteriology (no more sniffing bacteria!) and we're now doing cancer. the lectures are pretty interesting, and to some extent we've covered a lot of the stuff last year in biochemistry (esp stuff on the molecular basis of cancer i.e. how cell signalling pathways cause cancer), so a lot of the new stuff we're doing now is more clinical, like identifying the different types of cancer, and how they spread, etc. the practicals are really well taught (pathology's one of the best organised depts in cam) but even then it can get a bit tedious looking down a microscope trying to work out which cells are cancerous and what type of cancer they are! in the exam we'll have to also redraw what we see down the microscope, and compile a mini-report... i can't really see myself doing amazingly well here...

pharmacology:
having completed pharmacokinetics (which was pretty much all equations!) we're now doing chemotherapy, which links in nicely with path. the big problem though is the sheer volume of drug names... last term most of the drug names were easy to learn because we'd heard of them before e.g. aspirin, heparin (in cardiovascular pharmacology). in chemotherapy, they've all got mental names depending on whether they're antiviral, antibacterial or anticancer! at the end of the day pharm is one of those subjects where you just have to learn the material, rather than understand any particularly difficult concepts.