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Kudos to my good friend Michael Vasimalla who inspired me to write this, based on this comment:

Dr Corinne Van Heuvel (in a lecture): What do you think this is?

At this point, Michael decided, based on the shape, that this slide showed a picture of an inflammed brain. Just before he answered, Dr Van Heuvel decided that this specimen was not easy to identify, and gave an appropriate hint:

Dr Corinne Van Heuvel: Here’s a hint, girls don’t have these…

Michael Vasimalla: (following on from his train of thought) Brain…

The specimen, of course, was an enlarged prostate gland.

This will take on a slightly more (but only very slightly) serious tone to my last post. Resource is not assessable per se by the lecturers and helpers in the session but rather as an exam, which does matter significantly more than the PBL assessment because if you fail this, then good luck trying to convince the MLTU that you have compassionate reasons to sit a supplementary exam. Okay. Shall we begin?

How to get the most out of any given resource session:

1. Given that you have a one and a half hour session, go to all three hours of that one and a half hour session. Yes, you heard me right. If you don’t understand what I mean, go and figure out what this means before proceeding.

2. Tables have more than one side. Learning to read upside down is a skill easily learned, and sessions are usually cramped, because of recommendation #1. Being tall is another good option but it’s not one that I’ve been able to use.

3. If you ever get Professor Mounir Ghabriel, bring a pen and a notepad and seek him out. If you are successful, this will result in a very intricate study resource on your notepad. This you can sell on eBay for a profit, but it is usually used either to pass exams or as a dowry for a very attractive, kind, caring husband.

4. On the other hand, if you don’t want to get drilled, don’t ever ask Dr. Jaliya “What is this?” The standard response is “You tell me what you think it is.” Approach someone else. Like Melvin if he is there. However, bear in mind that it is good to be drilled if you actually know what the things are because then you can consolidate your information. However, in such cases, there isn’t really much point in asking Jaliya the aforementioned question without looking like a tool. Get someone else to ask Jaliya, and then all will be revealed.

5. Your coursemates are a good and reliable source of information. Without making it too obvious that you are leeching information off them, it is possible to leech vast amounts of information off them. Simply ask to “test” them on what the flags are on a particular pinned and flagged specimen without . If they refuse, don’t push it - because they won’t know what stuff is, so you won’t be able to learn. However, if they do name the flags, good, you now know what the flags are, so that when someone comes and asks you what the flags are, you can tell them, and then they can take your place.

6. CT scans and cross sections are things you will need to visualise in three-dee. Imagine the person in the cross section is standing up. Now, that’s the wrong orientation. Right is left, left is right, up is down, and down is up. And everything you know is wrong. Therefore, anything you write is wrong. Therefore you will fail resource. Quod Erat Demonstrandum. Unless of course, you have your orientation right. In which case, none of that has to happen. You should be able to name every big vessel or organ in the cross sections and every chamber. If you can’t, see Technique number five.

7. Approach to pathology pots: You need to be able to describe these as if you were showing your “extensive knowledge base” (see PBL 101). In other words, you need very little knowledge base. You do however need to be able to:
orient the specimen (this is a transverse section)
identify the specimen (this is a lung. inside joke.)
pick out things which are obviously not supposed to be there (there is a lesion right here)
describe what you see (this surprisingly takes close to no knowledge at all: this lesion is on the lateral surface of the specimen. It is bordered by connective scar tissue)
describe what you think happened to cause what you saw (I think the lesion was caused by an invading pathogen, which resulted in an inflammatory response in which macrophages and neutrophils infiltrated the area and phagocytosed damaged and infected tissue which resulted in the formation of an exudate which probably filled the lesion. Connective tissue then formed around the lesion as part of the healing process resulting in the visible scar tissue.) This is the hardest part, significantly. Fortunately, it’s also worth the same as the description usually. Fortunately, there are only so many specimens they can test you on, and usually it will be very obvious what it is, at least, in first year. You should be able to do this out of resource anyway in the pathology pot room. Go up there with a friend and describe to them the pathology you see in one pot and switch. Keep doing this until you can pull random descriptions out of your backside. Once you can, you will need to have a DRE to make sure there aren’t any residual descriptions, because they can cause rectal haemorrhage, which is not a very nice pathology to have.

8. Approach to histological slides that you don’t yet know or have never seen: Purple is acid (importantly, DNA or RNA, the A stands for Acid), pink is base (importantly, proteins, because polypeptide chains have lots of N termini which accept H+), and white is lipid or empty space. Red is usually Hb which is usually in erythrocytes which can be found in capillaries in most histological slides. Got that? Good. Because it’s not enough by any standards. Other very simple stuff that might make you pass:
Layers on the outside or inside of something = epithelium. You probably should remember the different types of epithelium - simple (one layer) vs. stratified (many layers) vs. pseudostratified (kind of layered), columnar (tall) vs cuboidal (about the same width as length) vs squamous (flat). Any combination of the first three and the last three should cover almost everything in terms of identification of epithelia. Also, structure begets function. Why this type of epithelium here?
Infiltration of neutrophils usually means inflammation. What happened to cause the inflammation? And what do you think the neutrophils are doing? (the answer to the second question is usually “phagocytosis”.) You will see this in many histological slides throughout the year.

9. Name (often) begets attachment or location or shape or function or some other quality of the structure. Especially for muscles. Muscles are often named by what they attach to (sternocleidomastoid), what they do (adductor magnus) or where they are (supraspinatus) or some combination of the above (flexor digitorum profundus). And sometimes they have some other quality (semimembranosus) and sometimes the anatomist wanted to be really annoying by not making it easy to remember, in which case, too bad (sartorius). Fortunately, muscles tend not to be named after people. Other structures do. Ask yourself whether it is so efficient to learn those names. If not, move on.

10. Gravitate towards any lecturer which is having a discussion with students. This is usually due to someone else using technique number 3 (wise), the opposite of technique number 4 (not so wise), or the equivalent. Either way, there is much to be learnt. Jaliya or Ghabriel seem to be the most knowledgable regarding anatomy while Dr Van Heuvel is always approachable about path pots without a resulting long boring conversation.

What actually happens in the resource exam:
You’ll have to come in either just before or too early for your exam (based on the fact that there isn’t enough room and there needs to be more) and be placed in a waiting room (room being the Florey Lecture Theatre) prior to your exam. From there you will be led either downstairs to the sterile white hell or upstairs to level four, where you will sit down and panic. Don’t panic. Sit at a station (preferably the hardest one you can see) and write your student number on the paper at the station. You will be given about six minutes at each station to answer the questions at that particular station once the exam starts (the starting station is the one you will spend the most time on and therefore you should sit at the hardest one first). Once that is done, you will move on to the next station and answer the next set of relevant (or not so relevant) questions in your exam paper. After all stations are completed, you will find yourself magically teleported back to where you started from to spend another six minutes reviewing the exam paper (and catching up on the hardest question, which is why you should sit at the hardest station you can see to start.) Save here. You will then be lead to the other place (either the sterile white hell or level four, whichever one you didn’t go to) to repeat the exercise - again, sit at whichever one seems to be the hardest station.
N.B. The hardest upstairs question will usually be the one that has the least stimuli, while the hardest downstairs question will usually be the one with the most pins.

11. Find a good group of friends and study resource out of resource - this of course depends very much on the way that you learn best. For some, myself included, this is the most invaluable thing. For others, this will be a massive waste of time except that you will get to spend some quality time with your friends.

12. Melvin does private tutes. For free, provided that you are his friend Given that, I’m pretty sure he isn’t the only one that does. In fact anyone who has made it to clinical years is bound to have some residual knowledge they can impart. Even (and especially) your p2p tutors.

13. If all else fails, and even if it doesn’t, go and read through the SMSUA student papers (available for $30 or less from your SMSUA rep). Learn what the answers meant (given that they were given an S.) It’s last resort resource; this should be saved to a time close to exams, like about now.

Hope to see you all in resource soon without notes.