A wide-open space..

True Freedom.

For the first time in my life, I can claim this with absolute certainty.. at least for a little while :P

It finally happened.. I am now officially done with training and its' associated culminating examinations.. All that remains is the oath-taking, but that is of little consequence in this context..

No longer do I find myself in pursuit of a particular schedule to adhere to a rigidly-defined set of goals as prescribed by a rigorous curriculum.

Yes, schedules and tasks are here to stay, but the academic burden has now been lifted from my shoulders.. Only to be replaced by the more awesome responsibility of life as a private physician.. There are no more safety nets, no more easy fallbacks.. Every move must now be more calculated than ever, as a wrong move could send all your hard work spiraling down the drain..

Scary? Yes, but exhilarating all the same. I am now bracing for a very different kind of lifestyle from what I had grown accustomed to in the past years.. Finally gone are the endless duty nights, the relentless need to study for yet another exam irregardless of your state of mind, the ceaseless errands.. But yeah, I will be missing mostly the kind of fatigue that is unique to residency and fellowship training..

Life will still be tough, I will still get tired, and sleepless nights will still be spent, but it is comforting to know that all these hardships will now be done mostly on my terms and not in partial fulfillment as a requirement for something and such..

I was never too much of an academic. I had a slightly different way of processing information, and thus classical techniques of learning and review didn't work well for me. I needed to understand concepts and construct them in my own words, otherwise all my efforts at memorization would come for naught. The caveat of this was that I tended to simplify things to the point that even though the knowledge would be usable, I would purposely omit long-winding (what i deemed) unnecessary details so as to make the information so much easier to digest and process. As a result, my exam grades were never really all that hot. :P 

This was often a cause for concern whenever I took examinations, since I tended to finish early. Just to be clear, this was not due to any sort of brilliance or intelligence on my part. It was actually more of my dislike of retaining the information longer than I had to. I wanted to finish as soon as possible so that I could finally release my mind from all those bits of knowledge I was fighting to retain for examination purposes. Granted, I never really got high marks, and even failed quite a bit, but at least my brain got some catharsis :P. Fortunately, some things do eventually get ingrained into my system with repetition, which is why I think having my residency at a public hospital worked so much better for me as compared to my experiences at private institutions. This is not a knock to the private hospital people. Its just that the program you have may not work for some people, and conversely, other residents are not suited to be in public institutions.

Hmm.. going a little off topic already there.. Hehe.

I'm presently in the middle of completing my requirements and sending my applications out to potential places of work. I never knew being this free could also be this much stressful. :/ Now I finally have my entire future to think about, and I can now think of my goals more concretely than before, since I have finished what there was to finish.. It kinda makes all the sacrifices seem a bit worthwhile.. ;)