By: Romesa Qaiser Khan, 1st
year.
Module is
such an intriguing word. It has an aura of mystery, a charisma; it is an enigma
that begs to be resolved by those who haven’t experienced it themselves
firsthand.
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| other people everytime someone says "module" |
And here to
shatter all these illusions is a little preview of what module system is
actually like.
- · Snoozefests- It is a universally known fact that any student, when locked in a darkened room with no profess-ional supervision, will fall asleep. Modules in fact humanely serve this purpose of letting students rest up after the tiring, demanding workload of the intermodullary block. The first row students are seen gently swaying like reeds in the wind and chaos gradually descends with increasing height of rows until the last benchers can be heard snoring before they are sighted stretched out on 3-4chairs in the anatomical position with an arm dangling here, a chappal lying there. Indeed the world has seen none equal to these sleeping beauties except perhaps on buses from Peshawar to Lahore.
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| what backbenchers do. |
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| what front benchers do. |
- Proxies, Proxies everywhere- What is sole reason that drives a medical student to day after day of grueling hardwork and grinding routine? Why, attendance of course (service to humanity is a close second). Module lectures can put the infamous Double Shah to shame as the number of students present multiplies by fours and eights in direct proportion to the number of times the attendance sheet is circulated in the hall. Module lectures are so high in demand that even the neighbor of your roommate’s friend’s neighbor shows up for it (on paper at least). Honesty may be a virtue but attendance is a necessity.
- · Molecular Biology errmhygawd- If nothing else, the star attraction of molecular biology (We’re still not entirely sure that this an actual subject. Research is underway) is sufficient to draw crowds of admirers to the highly philosophical, well-beloved Dr. Fridoon. Such clarity of concepts, such eloquence of narration and such importance in the world of practical medicine has never been held by any other subject in the history of mankind. “Life” is our favourite bedtime story and all of us carry copies of it in our hearts (read: phones). We adore this subject. Truly.
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| when teachers simply dont understand why we mark proxies. |
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| our usual expression in molecular biology. |
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| And Dr. Fridoon be like.. |
- · A Eutopia- The old auditorium itself is nothing less than paradise in the times of module. The most exotic smells (of everything from café’s biryani to people themselves to goats), the impenetrable darkness, the distant beacon of the slideshow that holds sacred knowledge (and is zero percent visible except to a certain 6/6 indiviual) and the orchestra of 300 people breathing with a few snores mixed in, will literally take your breath away (as in, suffocate you. And nauseate you. And suffocate you some more.)
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| what everyone thinks we do. |
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| what we actually do. |
- · INCOMING! Random books, strange faces and a whole lot of foreign words- The Newton’s law of the module system holds that:
“For every single lecture, there are at least thirty slides, multiple books and a legion of visiting professors.”
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| we second the minion. |
the amount of information imparted to us defies comprehension (it LITERALLY does).The best brains from Stanford, MIT and god-knows-where-else are recruited to teach us the highly complex basics of…cells. They make a lasting impact on our minds (some students still hear whispers of WNT at 3 in the morning) and probably scar and traumatize our hippocampus for life. Teaching expertise as the world has never seen is unleashed on us in this singular hall of doom in full force like the fury of Zeus. To top it all off, the module ends with us walking the planck (read: giving a test) in which the foremost question of any significance in everyone’s mind is, “what happens I fail this?”
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| seems like a legit option. |
Ofcourse the module system has numerous genuine benefits such as amazing clinical learning, new medical advances and interesting information, which just happened to slip my mind while writing this raging litany. Oh and I neglected to mention that we’re probably getting the best medical education in all of Pakistan too. However I shall convieniently ignore the fact, like we all do, that whoever approved this system for us was probably an intellectual genius with a vision. Rather I gleefully conclude, they just wanted to watch the world burn.
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| their likely expression, whoever they are. |