Dino Gačević, medical student, first-year Master’s
It is cold in the Netherlands, and it has been raining a lot. A continuous drizzle that slowly erodes things left outside, driving even the heartiest among us indoors, blurring my four-eyes so much that everything looks foggy and desolate. It makes a man feel downright downtrodden.
If you squeeze your eyes shut and prick up your ears, you can hear the pitter-patter of the rain in the muffled mechanical clicks on the keyboards of my fellow students who have joined me in attending lectures, now in the physical sense. Clickety clack. Ah, how I have missed that sound after all those months of online education! Now: it is only a drizzle, of course, in contrast to the grand, three-dimensional sound in the sloping lecture halls, where we as students gathered en masse in pre-COVID times, a sound which like a waterfall flooded and penetrated my ears, clicking and clacking in which I myself relentlessly participated. Clickety clack. The pitter-patter is different now, it is more of a murmur, more meditative, like rain falling on a misted window pane behind which I am relishing a good book, sipping on some hot chocolate and rocking in my creaking rocking chair.
‘My brain is receiving the information, my thoughts are more streamlined, but are no longer set in stone.’
The reason I am talking about the pitter-patter in the third person is because I have stopped taking notes myself. During my Internal Medicine internship I did not benefit once from all the notes I had taken, which were elaborate and exhaustive in their detail, with bolded key words and screenshots of thorax scans. Everything I needed in terms of information was interactively and manageably consumable on the educational site Canvas, could be found online on pages like vademecumhematologie.nl, uptodate.com or startpuntradiologie.nl, or was a clinical situation too specific for my notes. Furthermore, replacing the standard “bloktoets” with the “Interuniversitaire Voortgangstoets”, for which we do not have to learn, has muted any incentive for elective learning (if we may truly call it elective). My notes have been gathering digital dust somewhere in the back of the folder “Internship” > “Internal Medicine”.
The fact that I no longer have to type along gives me peace of mind. I can now really pay attention to the lecturer and I have the mental space to actually participate. Sometimes, saturated with information, or ruminating on a thought, I allow a glance casted outside, through the window. I see fellow students feverishly documenting exactly what the lecturer is saying, as if taking a speedy dictational exercise. Clickety clack. Stirred up, nervousness sets in; feet start to tremble and nails are being bitten. Webwhatsappnotifications pop up aggressively red in the corner of the screen, web shops lure with their promises of glamor and gratification, Instagram has already been opened on a second webpage, oh help, I have not bought anything for Christmas yet, who am I going to celebrate New Year’s Eve with, what is Ariana Grande doing by the way?
Clickety clack. I turn my attention back to the lecturer. My brain is receiving the information, my thoughts are more streamlined, but are no longer set in stone. I am not sure whether at some point I will blame myself for no longer taking notes. Clickety clack. We shall see.
