exam exam exam

the exam went ok. following is my brain dump about the exam. i apologize for the length.

one question (on neurogenesis, the creation of new neurons in the brain) was all i could have asked for. it asked a fair amount about the topic, but was explicit about what it was looking for. there were a couple aspects of the question that i didn't really know, but overall i thought it was ok.

another question was also good. it was an interesting angle on a topic (mRNA trafficking and local protein synthesis) that i'm pretty familiar with. i know a little bit about the angle, and so it came together as i was writing it. of course i would have liked to know more in some areas there too, but i'll live. whether i'll pass or not, i'm agnostic.

there was a list of six questions, and after i picked those two above questions, things got a little harder. i started to answer a question that clearly was written in response to a topic i chose that i'm really interested in: backpropagation, the travel of the signal of the neuron in what one might consider the wrong direction. ultimately though, the question asked more about downstream mechanisms than i knew, and i just couldn't put it together. after writing about half a page, half of which was unrelated to the question, i started re-assessing the other questions.

i decided to answer the question on cytoskeletal regulation, in spite of the fact that i thought it was a poorly conceived question and the other fact that it asked me to compare the regulation of the cytoskeleton in the neuron to that in migrating cells. guess what, i don't know very much about migrating cells. happily i knew a couple of examples of cytoskeletal regulation in migratory cells. unhappily, i didn't know enough to make a complete comparison.

for the last question, since i had decided i wasn't up to answering the backpropagation question and i hadn't studied synaptogenesis (i had eliminated it as a topic in an effort to strategize for the exam), i had to answer the question on alzheimers. the question had a broad component, and i felt good about my knowledge of the mechanisms of the pathology. however, the second part of the question was about potential treatments, and that was harder. i answered it anyway. it was my weakest effort, in part because it was the last question i answered and i wasn't as coherent. i'm annoyed at my relative lack of knowledge about potential treatments (i ended up choosing gene and antibody treatment), because if i was going to spend more time studying for that topic, that's what i would have chosen. i explicitly had the thought: the professor who is most likely to be asked to write that question is always interested in applications of basic science to treatment.

i don't know when i hear about whether i passed the exam.

i feel like i should write down things i learned about taking exams like that, but i also feel brain dead. none of the questions could be argued to be outside of the topics i wrote down, but some of them were definitely more in depth than i went, or deep in a different area than i studied deeply. i'm glad i was right about some things i studied.

if i was going to do it again, i would make a little fact sheet for myself on each topic with the main points. the table i made up of studies of neurogenesis were really helpful. generally, making a list of the main points of the experiments in the papers i read was really helpful. i found that sometimes i tried to get so much detail out of a paper that i wasn't solid enough on the basics. basics basics basics!