Thursday, June 08, 2006
holy mother of Todd
So I have started to make the leap from comfortable, fluffy dreams to cold, hard reality. I am applying to graduate school for physical therapy. Eep. Actually, before I can even apply, I need to take some prerequisite courses...and take the GRE ...and earn about 200 hours of volunteer work under a licensed PT. Wow, piece of cake! A piece of broken glass-filled cake.
I am applying to three different schools for the PT program, to increase my odds of getting in, and also to prolong my misery. If I get rejected by one school, I have 2 more possible rejections to look forward to!! But I can't dwell on that idea too long...I get a stomach ache.
The pre-requisites for each school are basically the same, but each has a few variations that are put into the curriculum strictly so that idiots (like me) are immediately terrified and run away...thus decreasing the candidate pool. Classes like... Human Anatomy with Dissection Lab...Abnormal Psychology...Physics with lab including mechanics, heat, light, sound, and electricity (Does physics include anything else? I guess we're skipping the physics of magic tricks and embarrassing bodily functions). I'm particularly unhappy about physics. I sold my soul to the Devil in order to pass my honors advanced physics final in high school and I was promised by his minion (my physics teacher) that I would NEVER have to use physics again in my life. Aside from occasionally obeying the laws of gravity and time, of course. Lies, all lies!
So anyway, in order to ensure that I can apply to all three colleges, I need to take 17 classes instead of the basic 7. Doh.
That means I need:
General Biology with Lab
Biological Sciences I & II (this could be the same as General Bio...but they were listed as courses separate from Bio I...dammit!)
General Chemistry I and II
General Chem Labs I and II
Organic chemistry with lab
Biostatistics
Human Morphology (Anatomy)
Dissection Lab
Human physiology with lab.
Physics I and II with lab
Principles of Human Behavior
Behavior Disorders (or abnormal psych)
And if the grad schools for some reason don't except credits from Penn State, I'll need to take Calculus, Intro to Statistics and Psychology. AGAIN.
I am listing these classes in order to illustrate my panicked confusion about all of this, like....what the hell is biostatistics? What is the difference between human morphology and human physiology? Or biology and biological science???
What's that? Am I terrified, you ask?? Does the Pope where pants??
Of course he wears pants, that's not the point here. Focus, dammit!
So I'm intimidated, and not sure what to do. If I apply to only one school, I just need seven prerequisites. If I apply to two, I'll need nine. If I apply to all three, it's fifteen plus. What do I do?!? Is it better to spend more money and time getting more classes in just so I can apply to ONE more school? What if I don't get into any of the schools?? What if I find out I took the wrong prerequisites and need to take MORE?? What if I left my laundry in the dryer and someone is STEALING MY BEACH TOWELS RIGHT NOW?!?!? Sorry, sorry. I have too much on my mind.
I guess this isn't really a funny post, but I thought I'd feel better if I wrote all this out. And you know what? It didn't work. Whoever said writing about a stressful situation is stress-relieving in itself must have left out the part where you take massive amounts of codeine and let the monkeys in your hallucination do the typing for you. Now THAT's stress relief.
(Ugh, that last paragraph was awful. All this stress and worrying has turned my usually crisp and penetrating humor into asinine and cliched jokes. I think for now I should finish out with a couple of awkward sentences that trail off before making a point.)
I am applying to three different schools for the PT program, to increase my odds of getting in, and also to prolong my misery. If I get rejected by one school, I have 2 more possible rejections to look forward to!! But I can't dwell on that idea too long...I get a stomach ache.
The pre-requisites for each school are basically the same, but each has a few variations that are put into the curriculum strictly so that idiots (like me) are immediately terrified and run away...thus decreasing the candidate pool. Classes like... Human Anatomy with Dissection Lab...Abnormal Psychology...Physics with lab including mechanics, heat, light, sound, and electricity (Does physics include anything else? I guess we're skipping the physics of magic tricks and embarrassing bodily functions). I'm particularly unhappy about physics. I sold my soul to the Devil in order to pass my honors advanced physics final in high school and I was promised by his minion (my physics teacher) that I would NEVER have to use physics again in my life. Aside from occasionally obeying the laws of gravity and time, of course. Lies, all lies!
So anyway, in order to ensure that I can apply to all three colleges, I need to take 17 classes instead of the basic 7. Doh.
That means I need:
General Biology with Lab
Biological Sciences I & II (this could be the same as General Bio...but they were listed as courses separate from Bio I...dammit!)
General Chemistry I and II
General Chem Labs I and II
Organic chemistry with lab
Biostatistics
Human Morphology (Anatomy)
Dissection Lab
Human physiology with lab.
Physics I and II with lab
Principles of Human Behavior
Behavior Disorders (or abnormal psych)
And if the grad schools for some reason don't except credits from Penn State, I'll need to take Calculus, Intro to Statistics and Psychology. AGAIN.
I am listing these classes in order to illustrate my panicked confusion about all of this, like....what the hell is biostatistics? What is the difference between human morphology and human physiology? Or biology and biological science???
What's that? Am I terrified, you ask?? Does the Pope where pants??
Of course he wears pants, that's not the point here. Focus, dammit!
So I'm intimidated, and not sure what to do. If I apply to only one school, I just need seven prerequisites. If I apply to two, I'll need nine. If I apply to all three, it's fifteen plus. What do I do?!? Is it better to spend more money and time getting more classes in just so I can apply to ONE more school? What if I don't get into any of the schools?? What if I find out I took the wrong prerequisites and need to take MORE?? What if I left my laundry in the dryer and someone is STEALING MY BEACH TOWELS RIGHT NOW?!?!? Sorry, sorry. I have too much on my mind.
I guess this isn't really a funny post, but I thought I'd feel better if I wrote all this out. And you know what? It didn't work. Whoever said writing about a stressful situation is stress-relieving in itself must have left out the part where you take massive amounts of codeine and let the monkeys in your hallucination do the typing for you. Now THAT's stress relief.
(Ugh, that last paragraph was awful. All this stress and worrying has turned my usually crisp and penetrating humor into asinine and cliched jokes. I think for now I should finish out with a couple of awkward sentences that trail off before making a point.)
# posted by yellow_mustard_girl : 10:04 AM
