Doctor Who?

The semester of all semesters. I said to myself that it would just be another rollercoaster ride through hell, only I’d need to pass through it five times more than the usual cycle. True enough, it was a rollercoaster ride through hell yet again. But years and semesters spent on this toxic environment has already made me unfazed for whatever intimidating and surprising circumstances I have yet to meet.

Four years ago, I was filling up the UPCAT form, still unsure of what I would like to be. I’ve always said that I want to be a doctor whenever some inquisitive grown-up asks me the age-old question of what I would want to be when I grow up, but it’s something I’m really not that strongly passionate about. Well it is, it used to be. High time was second year high school, when I started watching House on pirated DVDs I bought at Quiapo. Hearing all those rare clinical conditions and hospital jargons (blue cart, stat! 400 IV!) makes me giddy, even imagining myself doing those calls. Everything went downhill since then. Years passed and I found myself less and less engaged with the idea, yet the medical profession is one of the few things that I could see myself doing for the remaining years of my life. I’ve actually thought of a few other thing which includes being a high school teacher, a CEO of a multi-billion dollar empire, the mayor of Manila, and the weirdest of them all, everything what I said rolled into one: a self-made billionaire MD CEO of his own multi-billion dollar medical company, at the same time being the most-awarded mayor of Manila who teaches high school biology during his free time. If you think you have always had the weirdest dream like being a porn star, or becoming some famous internet figure, I bet you can’t beat me. So before I knew it, I’ve already put Biology as my choice.

Everything went on a swish ever since I learned that I got accepted into UP Manila. Next thing I know, I’m already sitting inside my Geology 11 class between two good friends from high school on a sunny Friday morning.  First day of classes and the professor asks who among us would pursue medical school after their undergraduate. Without a doubt all raised hands, except for one, and it wasn’t me.  I was still quite decided of pursuing med then. A month and a few weeks after this occurred, sometime after the release of the results of the first Math17 exams, the class was like Twitter, abuzz with the latest trending topics in hashtags: #dropping, #shifting, #failure, #(insert curse word here), and #iyak. Depression was at an all-time low that I just wanted to prescribe Zoloft to everyone. During this point, a lot have already considered to not continue with the program, just because of one exam. That’s how hard it hit us. It went on for a couple of weeks, only to be burdened more with the result of the second exam. But of course everyone had to be resilient and strong to not let things like this get the best out of us, so everyone treated it like it was just a bad air passing. Bottom line, most of us made it at the end of the semester. And of course no one shifted out. Yet.

The subsequent semesters proved to be more challenging, raising the level of difficulty tenfold as you go on higher. There were the Chemistry subjects to begin with. The Chemistry series was not a walk in the park to be honest, and I’m sparing you the agony of reading the hardships I went through. But a walkthrough of it would be somehow like this: Departmentals, the I know I wouldn’t get exempted feeling throughout the semester, learning you were indeed not exempted, reviewing the whole book for the finals, the finals, waiting for the final grade only to find out you’re removing, removals, anxiously awaiting for the removal results, passing, then letting out a very loud sigh of relief. I went through this cycle twice, for both 14 and 18. It was not a pleasant experience at all, and I have no plans of relishing it whatsoever. But of course chemistry is not all bull. Fun part of chemistry would go to the identification of unknowns. Have you ever heard of d-mannitol? I haven’t, until it happened to be one of our unknowns which we, unfortunately, failed to guess.  That’s also where the fun ends. Right there and then, we felt we’re one big lump of failure. It also made me question whether I would still be encountering that sugar in the future. Years later, my question was answered. And its memories weren’t so good as well either.

The other DPSM subjects were less brutal to me. The other Math proved to be somehow easier. Though I am sure I would get a measly grade for calculus since given it is a math, and math spells disaster for me (part of me actually wonders what happened to the elementary MTAP wizard I used to be a decade ago), I was quite confident that I wouldn’t fail this one. Although recently, an article from the New York Times titled Calculus for Kindergartens was published and man, I was put into shame, so as every single equation to compute for the velocity, speed, and height. If that got published earlier, I might have upped my final grade by more or less 0.25. Physics, on the other hand, brought less stress but the exams were just mind baffling. I don’t know where and how the professors got their questions, but I fondly remember the last exam of Physics 52 was just out of this world, I was staring at most of them. I’m surprised I passed that one, really. The wonders of shot gun system, I guess.

The GEs were the ones I took advantage of since they were my only hope of pulling my GWA up, and they didn’t fail to deliver. To my defense, I wasn’t even enrolled under the easier GEs, take for instance History 5. Believe me, this one requires a lot of memorization since my professor virtually knows everything. He’s like the reincarnation of Ernie Baron and Albert Einstein. Hands-down to this man though, he knows what he’s teaching.

And then, the majors. Non-biology majors would think that it’s just biology: plants, animals, and everything in between. Well, better tell them that if they can jot down the lyrics of Bahay Kubo using the scientific names of the corresponding plants, or are always ready to have an on-the-spot point quiz regarding the ventral muscles of the trunk region of a cat, or better yet recite the whole taxonomic classification to where Tubipora musica belongs, yes they can ridicule us all they want. Until then, no one holds the right to mock us for that, for our lame genetics jokes or for being fanboys and fangirls of Campbell  or Kent and Carr.

Biology is serious business; no one dares to question that. Learning the Kreb’s cycle by heart (to the point your vomiting centers are activated just to get rid of this concept out of pure satiation), when to use a Z-test and a T-test when gathering statistical data, determining the anomalous growth in Bougainvillea sp., using Google Scholar instead of Google Search to answer you laboratory manuals, or courting thesis advisers months before the start of the senior year, serious business is serious business. But of course, it’s not always serious biz here. Each one has their own way of detoxifying so as not to totally going berserk. I for one would allot an hour (or more) to catch up on my well-loved tv series and update my social networking sites. Others would have this weekly night-out in the town; some would just catch up on some well-missed hours of sleep. But the best one, I have to hand it to the fieldworks. You’ve got to love those fieldworks, people. Whether in Batangas or in Batangas, or sometimes a hundred kilometers outside of Manila, in Batangas, all those hiking, walking, treading, running, collecting, slipping, and catching makes you forget the hurly-burly of school life. Although tiring, all those moments are too precious not to forget.

You’ve got to love the professors too. How can you possibly hate them even though you’re on the brink of failing? These professors are like family to me: an amiable dad who teaches you what to do in case you specifically want a male progeny ; your all-around doting mom who knows how to distinguish a 24-hour chick from a 48-hour one given the organs that have developed; an internet-savvy brother who accompanies you to Manila Bay to collect ecological data, unfazed by the crazy women strolling along, flashing their mammary glands for everyone to see; and the prim sister who tells you that horseshoe crabs aren’t meant to be cooked in a skillet. I haven’t seen them get angry, and I have no plans of making them angry. Pissed off yes, but those could just be the hormones acting up.

The semester of all semesters. Another ride on the rollercoaster through hell and out, barely making it yet again. There’s no turning back now though. Well I don’t have a TARDIS (that’s Time and Relative Dimensions in Space for you, non-Whovians) to help me go back in time and correct whatever mistake or misgiving I might have done before, nor to help me check into the future to see whether what I’m doing presently would eventually pay-off. I have to admit, my stay in the Biology program has never been a smooth ride at all, and quite frankly, I’m not expecting it to be any better for the remaining semester of my undergraduate life either. Just when I thought I’m traversing a smooth path, there comes a large boulder that blocks me from going further, and I’m always needed to exert more effort just to make through or over it. I may fail at times, but I’ve always made sure that I would overcome any obstacle. This is just the beginning. The real world is out there, waiting to further harass us. But with everything we have experienced throughout our stay here in this program, we are more than prepared. I might think much about myself and the future, but I wouldn’t forget na isa akong iskolar ng bayan para sa bayan. After all, that’s what’s UP is about.