Stepping into the battlefield: Medic First Year

Assalamualaikum and hello everyone :)

It's been quite long since my last post, got to admit that my schedule was quite packed. But naahh, I enjoyed my life knowing more about human, diseases and drugs. Life needs to be balanced, even though my classes were stuffed from as early as 8 am to as late as 7 pm at some days, I kept it balanced with sports, social life with friends, ibadah, other activities and so on.

"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy"

Yes, I hold on to that quote.

Let's move on to knowing my course mates. Who knows you might know some of them. Some were from PASUM, PALAM, Matrik, STPM, but majority are from Asasi Pertanian UPM, including me :)

Ramai kan? I know right. Awal-awal, ada lebih kurang 98 students if I am not mistaken, but now we have 102 students, BAPOK RAMAI. Haha, still unable to remember their names but I'll try my very best, alahai, lagipun we have 5 years to know one another, so chillax saja bro, in shaa Allah akan ingat nama dan muka sorang-sorang.

Hmm, let me tell you a bit about how this medical course at UPM being carried out:

1. New learning method

Besides lectures and practicals, we also have Student Centered Learning (SCL). Got to say I wasn't enjoying that very much at the very beginning but soon, for almost 2 months now, I soon began to reap the benefits of it. Firstly, we got to know which parts are crucial, next, we got to enhance our understanding and more or less study the topics before the exam. Yea, I guess this SCL is awesome though, besides I get to know many students closer as we were divided into 5 classes each time comprising of different sets of students.

2. New style of exam

Basically, for the time being, we had encountered with Multiple Choices Questions (MCQ) and Single Best Answer Questions (SBAQ), but we will soon be assessed with OSPE (couldn't remember what), Short Answered Questions (SAQ) and etc.

Since standard 1 to foundation, we knew that MCQ comprises of A, B, C and D and we need to choose one correct answer right? But now in medic, it's totally different. MCQ is true or false questions.   Each correct answer will be given 1 mark and for each wrong answer, 0.5 marks will be deducted and if we leave it blank, no marks will be given nor deducted. Seems easy huh? No actually. I nearly tripped in this type of question :( But know what, this type of question teaches us one thing: In being a doctor, we need to make decision precisely, if we are very sure of something, then we can proceed with it.

Doctors are handling with people's life.

CONFESSION:

To be frank, during this first test, I nearly doomed for this one paper. Somehow I was being indecisive and questioning my own decision of stepping into this course. Somehow I feel that I am not qualified enough to be in this area. Feeling to rewind all these decisions I had made and restart all over again.

But, wait a minute.

I had performed istikharah prayer and istisharah with many people regarding this, somehow Allah lead me to this journey and He eases me to step in this path.

I need to set my mind straight, remembering the reasons I chose this path.

For sure, there are ups and downs in life, but we need to keep strong and be close to Him to ask for his guidance and help.

Please bear in mind that our results written in papers does not matter that much, but what's more vital is the knowledge that is in our head ;) When we are working in the real world, we need to apply those knowledge.

Hmm, in shaa Allah that's all for the time being. All the best guys in whatever journey you are in ;)

Till then, assalamualaikum.