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This is going to be one fcking long entry. So documenting all the exams I've had. I've never had an exam period like this before. Lots of extremely late nights, super cramming and.. well.. suits. First exam was the first batch of practical exams. The School of Omnometry requested us to actually wear business attire, as if we are actual omnom practitioners: to do our practical exams. Whilst this is all fun and good because we get to wear something different, fancy and spiffy, the opinion soon followed the converse once the temperature hit up to around 30 degrees, and suddenly being in a suit, tie, pants and shoes ensemble wasn't the most comfortable thing. After making sure I woke up early so that I don't arrive to the practical exams late, I got to the "joint" and there were already a mass of dressed up omnoms in the common room, hustling and bustling about what was to come. I got paired up with Mugz, which was all well and good because I have practised with her before and we get along quite well anyways. Two practical exams that day: the direct ophthalmoscope (a magnifying glass on a stick so you can look into the back of someone's eye) and the Slit Lamp Microscope (super hectic microscope with super hectic light) We weren't the first group to do DO, so logically, there were a couple of pairs/couples before us. When they came back, they were in tears, saying that the examiner outright failed them on the spot: "I just turned on the ophthalmoscope, went in to check the eye and then she went off at me, saying 'who taught you how to do DO? You guys are rubbish. I'm failing you right now.' " This wasn't the best thing to hear as just before entering the room. Once we did enter the room, Mugz did so quite cautiously as to not upset or erupt this active volcano. I felt that the best way to attack is not to defend, but to attack myself. So I decided to lighten up the mood and talk to her, but that didn't really work. Mugz went to work on me first and she showed that she knew what I was doing, making sure she examined every square milimetre of the back of my eye and announcing she was done. After, the examiner would snatch the ophthalmoscope off the examined student, have a look into the subject's eye and make sure they haven't missed anything. Being the subject, I took note of everything the examiner did and figured, "Hey, I should copy what she's doing, maybe I'll get extra marks." And so I did. When it was my turn on Mugz, I almost tried to do a mirror image of what the examiner did. I stood at a distance, and then told Mugz to look up, down, left and then right. "Uhmm... what are you doing?" the examiner asked. "I'm I'm...(shit fck tittty sex...) checking out the conjunctiva" "Why are you checking out the conjunctiva? It's DO, you normally check the back of the eye with it... conjunctiva you use the slit lamp. Are you trying to copy what I did? You don't even know what I did" "Oh no no no... I like to start out on the conjunctiva and then work my way in. Let's say if I had to do an in-house visit, I wouldn't have a slit lamp with me, so all I have is this ophthalmoscope" "Hehehe, fair enough. You're very thorough :) " Fck I escaped a bullet with that. Mugz told me how uncannily good I was at BS-ing and how it surprised her that I managed to troll the examiner. The reality is though, if I did fool her, good for me. If I didn't fool her and in fact, she fooled me back by pretending to be fooled, hey.. I deserved it. Slit lamp was something that I felt I was very good at doing. During the allocated practising times, I could do everything I wanted and find everything I needed and in fact, actually coherently helped other people whenever they had problems with the slit lamp. So I came into this prac exam quite confident until the smartsies needed to be pulled out. In the middle of the process, the examiner asked me to prepare for "tonometry". For those of you playing at home, tonometry is the technique that we use to measure the pressure of someone's eye (and is a very good indicator for stuff like glaucoma). The whole premise behind it is that you have this little plastic probe, and you literally push it against the eye. Depending on how much pressure you apply on the eye is dependent on how much pressure the eye itself can exert on that little probe, and the moment you counterbalance both pressures... well.. you've worked out the pressure of the eye. Pretty much the same principle as standing on a set of scales. Seeing as this "Tonometer" is mounted on top of the slip lamp microscope, it is routine that once you've completed the process, you have to check if the patient's eye is acutally still healthy and in tact after literally shoving a piece of plastic against the eye (Eye abuse really). Now I totally forgot to do that. It's almost equivalent to forgetting to check the traffic before entering a roundabout. But alas, I forgot to and carried on doing something random. The examiner goes, "are you finished doing what you have to do?" "Yes I am" "ok, let me have a look". The moment the examiner sat herself down, she went straight to checking out Mugz's eyes to examine the integrity. Fackity fack foq. Not only that, but I BS'ed my way through explaining how to calibrate the tonometer. Coming out of the slit lamp examination, I did feel a bit gutted. BUt then on the other hand, it was something I had to deal with quickly because, afterall, it was entirely my fault due to my own carelessness. No use blaming anyone else for it. The third exam of the day was a "slide exam", where they show picutres of eyes and you have to answer respective questions. THat didn't feel too bad and I reckon I got enough marks to see me through. With the exam finished on Friday, I had to prepare for my next exam... on the next Saturday. Physiology had the benefit that the lecture notes are fairly coherent and succint, so you can purely live off what's written on them and get by through the exams. It was just a shame that I was ill-prepared for the exam because I had my mind set on omnometry (and rightly so, seeing as I'm aiming and striving to become an omnometrist). So having only a night to prepare for the exam, I walked into the exam room knowing, "I might as well try my best... it'll only be justice if I get a poor mark." The multiple choice was long but I still managed to know a fair decent amount. Oh, and I forgot to bring my calculator into the exam so Iw as thinking, "fck.. I better go look for one". There was this guy sitting in front of me with two calculators, "hey mate, can I borrow one of your caluclators. I forgot to bring mine and yeh, I'm sitting right behind you so I won't steal it." "Uhmm yeh, one of them is about to run out of batteries though." "Yeh can I take that one instead." "Nah sorry mate... I just... can't" WTF man. There was probably only ONE question that used the calculator and everyone knew there was gonna be probably around 2 minutes of calculator work (provided you actualy know the formula). This fcker reckons he's going to need two fcking calculators for a physiology exam. What a wanker seriously.. and he tried to make him feel the victim hear, gaining my sympathy that, "yes, because I have one calculator that's low on batteries, and another calculator on full, you're not allowed to have any." Looked over on his desk and he didn't even touch the other calculator. Should have had a wisecrack at him after the exam, "fck, there were heaps of calculator questions eh?" So then I had Saturday night and Sunday all day to prepare for the next practical exam on Monday. With two of the exams knocked off already, the process of deduction suggests that I have my Colour Vision test test (I'm tested on colour vision tests - no typo) and the refraction. This time, I was paired up with Derpderp and she was sorta shitting bricks because she was paired up with me - considering all I do during uni is give her shit. I promised her that during the exam I'll be nice because... it is an exam afterall. First up was colour vision and we had the big boss Dain as our examiner. I'm not actually afraid of him but Nithla sure was. The first test I had to administer was the anomoloscope test. Basically it's a machine that can work out whether you are red or green colourblind and how bad it really is. Dain brought out the anomoloscope machine that I have never used before. "Uhmm, I didn't actually get to use that machine during our prac times" "Well you gotta quickly work out how to use it for this exam" "aww what? It was broken during the prac times." In a stroke of good luck, the fire drill bell rung and there was a sense of relief in me. I was literally saved by the bell, until we were told that it was just a fire drill and that all exams will continue as usual. Upon turning around and returning to my seat, getting ready to try and fck myself up with a machine I've never touched before, Dain tells me, "hey.. this machine is broken... very strange" and brings out the machine I was familiar with. Coasted along that cooly. He then tells me to administer the "Sahlgren test". It's basically a bunch of caps with colour swatches stuck on top of them and the point of it is that the patient has to try and sort out the swatches that are actually grey from the ones that are actually coloured. That's all I know about it, I didn't know how to actually score the test. So again, had to try and bullshit my way through and told Dain to "sort out the caps which look grey from the ones that look like colour." Once he was finished, I sat there just looking at him. "I suppose I better score this test right?" "yep.. otherwise the test is pointless." I didn't know what to do! I decided I could flip the caps over and hope something was written underneath and yes, there were numbers underneath. Decided to add them all and plot them on the graph. I found out later on that that is exactly how you administer the test. So for somehting I was meant to get 0% in, I think I went well in that. Stroke of luck Derpderp and I then performed the next test together, where the exmainer shows results of patients and we were meant to decide what kind of disease they had/what colour vision deficiency they had. Again, alot more BS came out and again, we came out on top.. predicting that the person was diabetic (diabetics tend to become colour deficient to blues and yellows) The next test we had was refraction (where we try and work out someone's prescription/work out the power of the lenses that heps them see best). You may think that all we have to do is ask for the answer i.e. Ask the patient what prescription they are wearing, and then dial it into the lens thingo and who's your daddy. But they actually put random lenses in behind the machine so that the patient/partner emulates a prescription that we have no clue what it is. To settle Derpderp's nerves, I volunteered to go first. I think I went quite well with it, everything went according to plan, and I got Derpderp from seeing nothing at all on the chart all the way down to the bottom. Although during the practical examination though, I constantly talked to the examiner and joked around. Whilst it's something that doesn't happen often, I am quite happy that the examiners allow me to be chirpy and.. well.. be Tan. I even made the examiner laugh and all the other people who were doing their exams came up to me afterwards, "Woah, all we heard in that room was your voice Tan, and YOU MADE THE EXAMINER LAUGH!" It's how I am really, I can never get stressed or anxious, I normally talk it off by keeping my mind off it. And I'm very fortunate that I don't have to be absolutely focussed in order to recall knowledge or information, so it's not like i"m going to get distracted. And so finished the end of the strangest exams I've ever had... the rest were a bit more conventional Vision science was that friday.. and so I had a good four days to prepare for that. Considering that on the last day of uni (the friday), we had an assessment task that covered the back half of the content, studyign for the exam wasn't that difficult considering half was already in my head. I reckon I did good enough for a decent mark. Just studied casually and concentrated on other exams but the only thing stpoping me from getting an excellent mark is that I'm sure that there are going to be even more excellent responses. This exam had long answer responses (four of them in fact) and they're sort of graded amongst the other responses. If you wrote a very good response, and someone else writes a fcking excellent response, you'll get around 7/10 even though you mentioned everything that needed to be mentioned. So I might be looking at an average/slightly above average mark here. Monday was the omnom theory exam. It was mostly multiple choice and it was all stuff that you learnt in the lecture material.. and considering it was omnom, you'd make sure you go through all the elcture material with a fine comb. Optics is always going to be optics... I've always thought of myself as a mathematician so I knocked off that section quite fast and easily (I tihnkt he questions were fairly easy to be honest in a general scheme of things). WHat troubled everyone the most was the "Ametropia" section. Ametropia is basically the fancy word term for the "disease" of being short sighted/long sighted..., if you dare call it a disease. Anyways, the questions they ask rely on more of an instinctive feel and isn't something that you can learn. It's almost like a trick question every question. No one ever comes out feeling 100% about that. With the large lump of exams finally over, the last exam was on a thursday and it was Occular Diseases. I haven't touched ANY of the lecture notes since week 3/13 and the whole purpose of the two day study period was that I had to learn 13 weeks of stuff... in two days. Seems like something most uni kids do in general anyway. So I meticulously went through each lecture note, one by one, summarising, rewording and hopefully, encoding into my brain. I managed to get through all the lecture notes by the night before the exam with a sore hand, sore eyes and definitely a spent brain. I was just hoping that I was able to recall everything that was to be asked and forutnately enough, the exam was quite straightforward and very basic. Whilst there's so many fine details about all the diseases we learnt, the exam seemed to have a general "skim the surface" sort of feel, and so I walked out of the exam early. And so ended my second year of uni. That night I invited all the optoms over for a good night out at the Nguyen household and I was quite surprised that a good turnout actually came. People actually made it a loooong distance to make it over and the presence that's generated by their dedication definitely showed because the atmosphere was very good. I've always tried to encourage a mingling attitude and gladly enough, most people adhered to that. Sadly there wasn't enough nem nuong for everyone though :( So next year, I'll probably triple/quadruple the load.. easily. There were fine moments, and then there were unclassier moments, but I'll leave it to be a memory rather than a recording on the internet. 
Hurlstone shorts are always classy at a party. So are chicks bending over.
Quite sure there were more people than this. 
Here we go, later on in the night. White people in omnom! NO WAY! Tan.N | 
