Saturday, June 2, 2012

Say Hello to My Little Friends: My Med Books

I finally bought my med books! I didn't buy all ten of them because...ahem...they were..ahem...too expensive. :))

 

Clinical Anatomy by Regions and Moore's Clinically Oriented Anatomy, and Netter's Atlas of Human Anatomy are must haves, as advised by the higher years, for Anatomy and Physio subjects.

They say Netter is a big big help when it comes to dissecting time. For Biochemistry, you can either choose from Thomas Devlin's Textbook of Biochemistry with Clinical Correlations, or Harper's Illustrated Biochemistry. Feedback from these 2 biochemistry books is that Harper's is more direct and doesnt explain most of the basic biochem stuff/concepts. Non-science majors might find it a bit more difficult to understand. Devlin, on the other hand, explains everything, and is very helpful for those who dont have a background in the hard sciences, or have never taken up biochem in college.

Of the two books, I still opted for Harper's even though I come from a non- pre-med course. Reasons are: 1) majority of the other students use Harper, as well as the professors, I just want to be on the same page (both literally and figuratively) when classes start. I dont want to get confused if I use Devlin while others use Harper. 2) They say that the board exams base their biochem questions on Harpers. I dont know if there's any truth to this, but one school who has had a 100% passing rate in the board exams have sworn by this.









Aren't they soooooo purdy?!?!?! :))

They are heavy as hell, and if I had to bring those to school everyday, I would probably have severe scoliosis by the end of the year. loljk.

I was able to get some of the books here at half price from 2nd and 3rd year students who weren't able to use them that much during their first year. I kinda had second thoughts about buying it when I realized that they were selling it because they were unused. Then again, one of the students explained that there were so many things that they needed to study at one time that they barely had enough time to read these books, and they just relied on a collection of tranx or transcriptions.

Tranx is a reviewer which is a combination of the teacher's actual lecture, and the book. So one student records the teachers whole lecture, transcribes it, matches additional information from the book, and voila! you have your tranx.

Why not just refrain from buying all the books and focus on the tranx? Well, for one thing, I dont want to get dependent on other people's work. Sure, I can make my own tranx for every single subject, but I doubt I'd have the willpower to actually do it, as well as the time involved.

These books will be my best friends for the next few years, I just hope that they'll love me back. :))








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