When real life hits

I came upon the realization that everything that I am in the process of learning in my years of college are things that will be directly applicable to my career. This is pretty obvious, but like in high school, how we learn stuff only to prepare us for college and relearn it all over again. Tell me that didn't happen with bio and physics and you'd be lying. We come to college and it didn't matter if we forgot all of it, because it was just going to be retaught. I'm in Neuro201 right now and we're going into more detail than we ever did in 101, but the course still started off "this is a neuron." Yes this makes sense. But what I mean is, there will come a point when our classes will require us to have a large basis of knowledge to understand what is going on or otherwise be completely lost. Not that this isn't already starting to happen, but in med school I'm sure it'll be like, cool so you know about the body so let's talk about hyperglossotriskadelaphobitis. No it's not a real thing, don't google it. So many of us are still learning for a final exam and not for a career. Maybe yeah, in classes that are reqs that's okay, but even a coreq of your major that might seem like you will never use it should be learned fr the material, not the exam. We learn and then we forget. I'm guilty of it, I've forgotten every word I learned in organic chemistry. But to be honest, it's so important in neuroscience, even though it's a pre med and not a neuro requirement. My advice would be to stop worrying so much about grades and exams and start learning and doing well in your classes because you like them or you wouldn't be taking them (okay mostly. There are exceptions like orgo in which case you are working toward a certain goal by taking the class). I've mostly followed this idea and I did a lot better in my classes last semester, seriously. The things I learned in neuro277 were relevant to my life and things that I knew I wanted to pursue because I had so many questions about them and I wanted to study them all so much deeper but that's obviously not possible, there isn't enough time in the world to learn about everything. Feeling this way makes me so happy though because I know it means that neuroscience is something I am passionate about learning. I think if I were to take a sociology or psych course I'd actually really like those too. 

So my other point was that the power of interdisciplinaryness (not a word) occurs to me everytime I take a class that isn't cross listed under neuro. Things like physics, compsci, orgo, english, history are all so important in neuro, just as there are a million other things that are important for each of those. I love the way that you can see connections with your field of study with everything else people do. Action potentials couldn't be understood fully without knowledge of electricity and how it works. Protein channels are set up in such ways that you need to know organic chem to see how they fit with one another. You can call yourself a neuroscientist or a physicist or a marine biologist but you can never be just one without at least touching on the others, and I'm finding that more and more fascinating. 

We then need to take these things we've learned and apply them to what our careers will one day be. I don't honestly think I'm even close to being able to do that, and I keep saying, oh I'm probably just not there yet, it's coming, but come on. If you truly want to know your field, it's about time at almost 20 years old that you know it. I want to leave a mark on the world, but with the pace I'm going at and how disappointed I am with the way my brain has trouble thinking outside the box, I'm rather afraid that won't happen. I guess I need to try harder.