Monday, February 10, 1997
MAJOR:
Aspirations of becoming a doctor vanish in hazy fog of
O-Chem
I have a secret to share with you, my most trusted reader. I
wasn’t always the happy-go-lucky psych major you see grinning
insanely at you every other Monday (By the way, isn’t that the most
grotesque picture on Earth? I wanted them to use a picture of
Antonio Banderas for my column photo, but all my editor said was
"Uh, yeah right … idiot."). I was quite a different person a
couple of years ago.
My college career began the way most other UCLA students begin
theirs: as an arrogant, smug, TA-smothering, in-class question
asking, front row sittin’, 2-ton backpack carryin’, notebook
scribblin’, up-all-night studyin’ pre-med. I lived at South Campus.
I had all of my mail forwarded to the chemistry building. At the
Bombshelter, a rice bowl was named in my honor since I spent so
much time there. They called it the Torres Bowl. Classes like Bio
5, Chem 11CL, and Math 3A dominated my first year, and although
life was hard I was able to handle it relatively well.
Actually, I kind of enjoyed all of the pressure and hard work. I
liked being able to talk all of that chem and calculus lingo to my
friends. I thought it was cool to talk about how many acid burns I
got in lab or inventing new and funky acronyms for biology
classifications.
Visions of myself in one of those stark, white coats complaining
about the sticky clutch on my new Ferrari to my sympathetic
colleagues pushed me in my classes. I was convinced that I had a
good chance of achieving my dream of becoming … Dr. Torres,
Medicine Man. Unfortunately, all of that changed within the span of
one quarter. It was Fall Quarter of my sophomore year, to be
exact.
It was a warm fall day when I walked into my first Chem 132A
class. O-Chem  the ball breaker of chemistry, the Great
Pitfall of aspiring doctors, the Classic Weeder, the Pre-Med
Punisher. I knew I was in trouble when I walked into CS50 and saw
every single seat, step, doorjamb packed with students writing
furiously in their notebooks. Their eyes were wide and spinning
crazily, absorbing every single molecular formula, diagram, and
word the professor wrote on the already completely full blackboard.
Damn, and I was only a minute late. They all had the same look on
their face  the ravenous, panicked look people have when
they’re stuck on a breaking raft in the Amazon surrounded by
piranha, like they would throw their mama to the river before they
themselves jumped in. Hmmm, I thought to myself, this class might
be a little hard.
The first midterm was the easiest. I got a C-plus. The second
was a little harder. I got an F-minus. The professor put my exam on
a huge overhead as a demonstration for the class about what not to
do on a chemistry exam. By the time the third midterm rolled
around, I was spending every waking moment trying to incorporate as
much information from my chem book and lectures as possible.
Unfortunately I lost all sense of coherence; everything in my book
looked like poorly written Chinese. I didn’t understand a word in
discussion. I would have stopped going to section, but a very cute
girl sat next to me every time I went, so I had to put on an
illusion of intelligence for her. Before they gave me back my third
midterm, they had a counselor sit me down and explain that there
was more to life than just good grades, especially in my case. He
also gave me the number of a very respectable suicide prevention
hotline. I did so badly on my midterm, they had to invent a whole
new alphabet for my letter score.
I was so far behind by the week of finals that in a desperate
attempt to score brownie points, I asked my TA out to dinner at
Cheesecake Factory. Boy, was he surprised! (Just kidding, you guys
know I’m not like that. It was Sizzler, not Cheesecake.) The final
was the coup de grace. When I turned in my exam at the last second
of the allotted three hours, my professor broke down and started
crying. I tried to console him when I handed him my exam, but all
he could do was pat me on my back and stammer out a feeble, "God be
with you son."
Physics was a lot less eventful. I was lost from Day 1. As soon
as I read the first problem on my first midterm ("Calculate the
moment of inertia of a 6-foot-tall man who takes a running jump off
a cliff at an angle of 23.0 degrees at an initial velocity of 90
meters per second and creates a crater 70 feet deep and five miles
wide in the asphalt below."), my spine began to crawl. The rest of
the midterm wasn’t much better. I actually showed up at the wrong
room for my final in that class. It took me a while to figure out
that the genetics exam question ("What do XX and XY imply?") wasn’t
about vector positions. I think I repressed most of my memories
about that class, because I don’t really remember much about it,
except for remembering hearing URSA giggle before she announced my
um, shall we say "uninspiring" grade.
Sometimes, though, I have these weird nightmares where I’m
standing at a base of an immense, looming cliff staring at this
rapidly approaching blob plummet through the sky. Right before I
get squashed, I realize that it’s Ed O’Bannon and he’s waving my
physics midterm frantically while screaming, "Aaah! You should have
studied your vectors, bastard!" Splat!
Needless to say, that quarter, for lack of a better word,
sucked. It was truly disastrous. If it hadn’t been for the lame
English class I had taken at the same time, my GPA would have taken
a kamikaze nose-dive from which there is no return. It was at the
end of that quarter when I had what can only be described as an
epiphany: I realized I wasn’t meant to lead a pre-med life.
I hated chemistry, physics was mind-numbing for me and I had
lost my competitive edge. I had stopped caring whether someone got
a higher grade than me because I hated my classes so much. I
started to hate science. Me! The freak that always used to watch
3-2-1 Contact and all of those National Geographic specials, even
the ones without naked people. I knew I had to give up my pre-med
illusion in order to maintain my sanity and self-respect. I had
come in as a psych major but had since switched to physiological
science. I decided to switch back.
I can honestly say I’m glad I’m not pre-med anymore. I really
love my major. The classes are fun and worthwhile (most of them
anyway), and I usually manage to stay awake in most of them (an
incredible achievement in itself). Now, I finally feel like I’m in
control of my life and that I’ve found my niche, smack dab right in
the middle of North and South Campus at Franz Hall.
But the best thing of all? Absolutely, positively, guaranteed,
never again on any test in my life, will there ever be another
chemical reaction or vector problem.
Hallelujah! Good luck on midterms, everybody!