Disappearing Act

Posted 09:52 PM, June 25, 2007, by thomas.tsai

I've spent the last month and a half studying for the boards.

I've basically been holed up in the Lane reading room at Green library, and I'd been there so much these last few months that the librarians know me now. I've also joined this secret cult of studiers in the Lane reading room. Besides my classmates and I, there are a few usual suspects who have also been studying there a lot. I don't know who they are and they don't know who I am, but we nod heads towards each other when we pass by and we respect each other's turf. And by turf I mean desks.

So the big day came on June 23. The night before I went to bed at 10PM, which is quite early by my standards. Of course of all the nights it had to happen, I couldn't fall asleep on the night before arguably one of the most important exams of my life. I tried to sleep, but kept on tossing and turning for the next several hours, until around 1AM I decided to get up and take a hot shower, hoping that it would relax and calm me down.

Luckily, my roommate (an electrical engineering PhD student from good ol' Belgium) was up, and I solicited his advice for calming my friable nerves, figuring that a scion of the old world would surely have a remedy for my plight. With a straight face he told me that he too usually couldn't before big tests, and that the only way to deal with this antediluvian insomnia is 1) drinking a mug of warm milk and 2) counting sheep. The best thing about this is that he actually meant this. Drinking warm milk? I think he thought I was a little kitten or something. And counting sheep? Seriously?

With no better solutions, I made myself a mug of tea (in lieu of the warm milk), and then went back to bed. Still not being able to sleep, I decided to resort to the roommate's backup plan of counting sheep.

Counting sheep is the most worthless exercise ever. I didn't even know what counting sheep meant, seeing as I had no sheep or other ungulates residing in my room. At the risk of sounding like a complete idiot, I almost asked the roommate the protocol for sheep counting, seeing as I was a novice in that regard. But I figured that it would be most prudent to salvage what remained of my dignity and retreated to my room to count not sheep, but my potential USMLE Step 1 score. Starting at 0, I fell asleep around 130. 130, while a respectable IQ score, unfortunately is a laughable step 1 score, so my sheep/score counting did not bode well for the big day.

The big day arrived, and it was remarkably uneventful. I was on auto-pilot for the 8 hours of the test. To be honest, finishing the test was altogether anti-climactic. I half expected ticker tape and confetti to fall from the ceilings or doves to erupt into flight at the Prometric test center, but none of that happened. So I drove home and got some much needed sleep.

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