So, this week I took my three IPID finals. This stands for Introduction to Pathology and Infectious Disease, and covers immunology, parasitology, bacteriology, and virology. On Wednesday, I had an "answer 3 of 5" long essay, on Thursday I had an "answer 10 of 10" short essay, and today I had a "spot practical" by which I mean that we went around to stations and answered questions about the specimens.

I did okay on the long essay, I think. I'm pretty sure I passed the short answer, since only one of the 10 questions I completely blanked on. I was worried about the spot exam, though. All of the review material was as follows:
(Picture of worm)
"This worm was taken from a sheep abomasum. What is it? What is its life cycle?"
And so on.

In order to prepare, I (and by "I" I mean "Matt") printed off a bunch of pictures of various parasites and we spent the afternoon yesterday drilling them until I was pretty solid on parasite identification. "Dicrocoelium! Ixodes! Culex! Psoroptes!" I shouted as I became more and more confident. Even Matt was impressed at how quickly I seemed to pick it up, since I was at the end of a long week.

This morning, I ran through them again, and still felt good about the identifications. Yes! Maybe I would rock this exam!

Our final was 23 stations with about 3 questions at each station. We had 3 minutes per station and 2 rest periods, for a total of 75 minutes. I got, almost undoubtedly, every parasite identification correct. Yes!

Too bad that was only 3 of the 23 stations. Oops. Apparently, they decided it would be an "interesting twist" (in the words of the examiner) to focus on immunolohistology (3 stations) and bacteriology (at least 15 stations). Bacteriology?!?!? Of the review materials we were given, there was approximately 1 slide of bacterio stuff and 30 parasites. And no immunohisto stuff; that lab was LAST AUGUST.

I do not think I have ever failed an exam as spectacularly as I failed today's.

Does anyone have some chocolate I can eat?