Living and surviving in RSU 3rd semester :)

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This will be the first blog text that Im going to make in english. I made choose to do at least one text in english because people have asked for it.

So short story long or vice versa. Last post was about half time of the third semester. Now when I am writing this text the third semester has ended and successfully I passed to fourth semester. So what did the third consist including life in Riga and studies in medicine.

Lets start there where I left it last time. At that time we had just made our first colloquiums for the semester and must say that passing them felt good. We had generally colloquiums about 2/subject except in genetics. 

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So lets begin. In anatomy we went pretty much everything that you could think of. We started from easy respiratory system continued to GIT then checked out the urinary system and in the end we understood the differences between male and female reproduction system (btw. the females are much more difficult then males). Just that this would not be enough we also visited for a while in brain blood vessels so the first colloquium would not be too easy for us :) After this marathon anatomy amount it was easy sliding to the second colloquium which included just the autonomic nervous system and cranial nerves (so everyone already can think that after the first collo this was easy as ....) well... it wasn´t  :) Still the whole course ended to nice final exam where you needed to re-check your previous knowledge from past semesters (1st: bone+lig.+muscles and 2nd: nerves/bv). For the exam im going to tell you little bit later (so if you are interested just scroll down)

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Then everyone loves to hear about Histology, the study of tissues. There the subject went hand in hand with anatomy, it was nice to see e.g. Graafian follicle, Brain sands, small intestine and the glands generally of GIT. I think that at least seeing them in slides may help for the future studies in 4th and clinics because at least now we know how the healthy tissue looks. The only problem in histology was that we had it as a last subject on friday evening (after microbiology and physiology). So any classes that we had my energy levels were about 10% of max. Still somehow I managed past the colloquiums and even the exam. Colloquiums went the same road including the subjects as anatomy, except in second colloquium we had endocrine and reproduction system with urinary system. Histology during these two semesters held some good and bad moments but in the end it was very educating experience. I did not ever though that you could become so good "artist" that during 8 hours you can draw quite good histological pictures so you are able to do the colloquiums, but yeah, thats life...... 

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Next lovely dear subject genetics, which i had already made one colloquium in previous test. We went in the subject about from the repeating the 2nd semester subject more clearly including even more diseases to cancer genetics, which already included some pharmacological substances. In that course I used for the first time book to get the theory info, this was new way to learn the medicine. Kind of funny to say but the first year you can past easily even not looking the book. After that it starts to be more harder :) Genetics we had 3 colloquiums together and i barely survived from the second colloquium. If i need to point out one thing that I learned in genetics and really don´t want to do it again is calculating pedigrees.... So something new and something old, the pedigrees followed me from 2nd semester, but now Im done with it :) But at least I now know how to do Bayesian probability.

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Physiology the subject that you should love in preclinics. Actually I like this subject very much, only problem that I had with it was that first time (except library course) the teacher was not so good in language producing as other teachers. This why the most interesting subject in pre clinics went by the way we say in Finland "with a left hand". This means that the effort that you put in the subject was less then 10% of the whole effort that you but in the all subjects. The problem is that in the 4th semester you could have teacher who is more "active", but as our groups luck always goes, we still have the same teacher :) (this could be bad, very bad, good or very good thing) In physiology we did a lot of interesting test starting from reflex, EEG, vision, hearing, memory test, etc... Generally the test were lot of fun to do only maybe negative thing was that we had to write protocols and from there answer lot of questions that the protocol contained. But when there is something bad there is also good, so during these protocols we learned at least something, because otherwise the classes were almost useless (reason that I gave beginning of chapter). In physio we had 2 colloquiums and the first one contained pretty much the basics of physiology so reflex, AP, muscle contraction, etc and the second memory, vision, hearing and etc. ) In Physiology and Microbiology we will have final exams in 4th semester.

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Microbiology was funny subject. As I written before we analyzed some bacteria, check out some medias and vaccines. During classes we had lot of presentations of different methods, how we do passive immunisation, enterobacterias and immune system activation (humoral&cellular). The Micro contained 2 colloquiums and the ones who did not get grades from 7-> in collos got extra treat final test :) I was lucky and I got the extra treat so some more pressure for the semester (normaly the 3rd semester is said to be the hardest one) so no more life for me on january :)

For the final test (extra treat) I had to answer for the immune response, antibiotics and bacterial cell wall consistence so my variant for the test was luckily easy, and i passed it :)

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We also sadly ended our latvian language lessons for this semester and next latvian course will be latvian medical terminology, yes i know it sounds funny that you have not done the latvian language course that is considered to be including medical words before the clinics start, but sometimes things go that way. For the final day we bought some flowers and chocolate for our teacher and wrote a card to her so she would have memory from us. 

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Now when im writing this the exam period for me is done and i have succeed in passing the semester. The exams that we had was latvian language, anatomy, histology and genetics. For the latvian exam we had small test and oral test that contained prelearned discussion with teacher (monotonic discussion with teacher who says (ja/ne/ok) ). Next for me was the histology exam. This exam was new because well, that was the first exam in histology. It contained three parts 1. 3 questions theory (2nd and 3rd semester subjects), 2. Two slide recognition  (microscopic histological slides ) 3. Schemes (black and white picture where you try to guess what the heck somebody have mended here to draw). For me the questions were endochondral bone formation, gastric and adrenal gland (suprarenal) and slides were cerebellum and lungs, and the schemes were well something from artery-> vein and myelopoiesis :)

The next exam was genetics for me and it consisted 30 mcq and 5 pedigree questions and this was the only exam that i though that i would fail, but no...i got 4 and i must say that i never been so glad of any number, because then i knew that i passed the subject :) The last exam for me was anatomy one day after the genetics. In anatomy i must say that i had good luck, i had the teacher who actually likes us student and gives some slack if you make mistakes, that was good because in my mental state i started to describe fossa media, when i should been describing fossa temporalis (well shit happens for the good ones too ) my questions were heart (bloodvessels), fossa temporalis & infratemporalis communication,walls and content and as a last nice question the male external genitalia (funny thing you can forgot quite obvious things of the genital part even if you have them yourself) :) 

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Then the last thing the life of the 3rd semester. First you dont have it :) You have your books, ipad (books) and library hours. Really this semester was very hard for each of us im sure it, and that is the reason why our group had some casualties during the semester. I have said before that im now in the best group and this group was one of the reasons why I passed this semester. This is why it is very sad to lose few great persons of our group, because they could not make the semester. Generally third semester life is depended a lot of studying hours, but when you have the small time you spend it with friends. RSU third semester is studying and what i have heard is that the fourth semester is similar. So the 2nd year is hard in any medicine school and the reason could be because of so tight schedule , you can still pass it if you just study from beginning few hours at least each day. 

                                          Best group ever!

I hope next text will be before summer vocations and I will be more active here, but who ever knows. Now in the end few nice videos one for the 3rd semester students in RSU and other one for the Finns :)

                                           YOU GUYS MADE IT!