Midterms

    Finally finished midterms yesterday. 5 midterms in a week was pretty intense, especially because my brother came in from North Carolina for Thanksgiving and that really cut into weekend study time. Oh and not to mention that three of my exams were basically in another language (Botanical Medicine, Homeopathic Medicine and Asian Medicine). Overall they went pretty well though, and it was nice finally getting to relax last night after studying every day for the past 15 days! I'll do a quick recap of what the exams were like.

Tuesday morning --> Anatomy
Dr. Terzic wrote a pretty fair exam. It was 85 multiple choice questions, 3 questions were matching but the rest were just straight up. Overall it wasn't so bad, I just had a little trouble remembering exact locations of some ligaments and muscles. The practice midterm questions someone put up on facebook were really helpful.

Wednesday --> Botanical Medicine
This was a pretty hard exam. All multiple choice (I think 50 questions). Quite a few questions about specific actions or names of phytochemicals. I think knowing the specific classes well would definitely help with this, also knowing some specifics from the safety stuff (especially about how to affect specific parts of liver detox, not just phase I or II) would've been good.

Homeopathic Medicine
This was a pretty tough exam with 50 multiple choice questions, just because knowing the remedy pictures was so hard for me. The stuff not related to remedies, like philosophy and terminology was actually not bad, I knew most of it pretty well. So just knowing the remedies better would be good; there was lots of questions about specific cases and what remedy should be used. The really tough questions asked "what would be the best question to ask to determine the correct remedy?" To help with this, it would be great to determine key difference between remedies.

Thursday --> Asian Medicine
Having past midterms was really helpful for this exam, but also it just wasn't so bad overall, with 60 multiple choice questions. Asian medicine seems daunting at first, but the more you study the more everything makes sense. There was a lot of questions just giving you symptoms and asking what pathogen is involved and stuff like that. There was also 3 full case studies, but then he gives specific symptoms from the list and asks questions about them, so you don't really need to read the case studies. As long as you know elements, pathogens, patterns and vital substances well, there really isn't any tricks in this exam.

Friday --> Biochem
This exam wasn't too bad because I've taken biochem already in undergrad, but also because it really followed our assignment closely. If you did well on the assignment, or made an effort to ensure you understood the stuff from it well, then it should be okay. The only real curveball of a question was about epimers and anomers --> kind of random stuff from our first lecture, but aside from that just following the assignments and past midterms on google drive was really helpful. The whole exam was short answer which was a bit of a change, but it really wasn't so bad since going over all the material and assignments made it pretty easy to talk about. And fortunately you can write point form so you don't have to kill your hands.

So that's it for the first set of midterms, 5 wasn't so bad, though 8 during finals will be interesting!