Like drinking from a firehose

A few years ago, I started talking about what my next career would be.  My first, as biochemist, didn't mesh so well with my second, as mom, so I started looking around for the third.

This past spring, after much deliberation, and the incredible luck of finding a like-minded friend, I decided to take the first steps toward a career in nursing.  I dusted off some very old college transcripts, re-learned the academic hoops necessary to pass the clep test in biology, and then enrolled in anatomy and physiology 1 during the accelerated 1/2 summer semester.

Why I thought this would be a good idea escapes me at the moment, but I enrolled, paid my tuition, and showed up for my first day of classes in a very long time. Despite the technological advances since the last time I was in a college classroom (really, the powerpoint slides are online?  why would I show up to class?), I still found it incredibly helpful to make notecards (see pyramid above) - lots of them - and memorize like crazy.

Compressing an entire semester of anatomy into just over a month was overwhelming and frustrating - a little like academic water-boarding -  but was also probably a good way to start. Kind of that "if you can live through this, everything else will seem like a breeze" way of thinking. My family has been ignored, my household chores have been neglected, and my dining room was turned into study central. The result - I passed, and I got an A.  One down, many many more to go.