I forgot to mention last time, but this week actually made me feel a little more love toward my fellow classmates of 2014. It's always been a sort of tradition at the School of Pharmacy for students to sit in the same seat for all 4 years of pharm school, and it's as expected when by the 3rd week or so of class, people already know where their seats are in the lecture room. However, this year, among all the other drastic changes for the class of 2014, we changed rooms after 3 weeks of class. Sure, there were people who always sat in the same seat already (the first and last row people particularly), but for some reason, my group of foursome still doesn't have our "own seats." We've been sitting in different seats almost every day. I started in the front row, but then started moving back to the middle-front. And there was a day when we actually only found seats in the last row.
That day, however, wasn't too bad. Before our Biochem-like class started, packets of the notes were distributed to our class. But when lecture began, we realized that our row and the one in front of us didn't receive any notes! We sat there for about 20 minutes looking around and trying to pay attention, but it was hard to follow along when we didn't have a hard copy of the diagrams. During that time, we tried texting people we thought were in the front row because there was a stack of notes up in the front of the room. We were hoping they would pass back a few, but no one in the front row apparently looks at their cell phone during class. Well, I guess that's understandable since they're right in front of the professor. So, I decided to write a post-it note to anyone in the first row asking if they could pass back 10ish packets to us in the back. And I let it go. My friends and I watched as the note was passed from row to row toward the front of the room. It halted for a while at each person because they obviously wanted to know what was being passed around. At first, we began thinking that the note-trick would fail because no one was getting up to grab a stack. When we were about to sigh, someone actually stood up! And grabbed some packets and they started being passed back to us! It was so lovely, seeing the helpfulness of fellow classmates passing back a bunch of paper to us. :) Really made me feel happy inside, even though I probably only know 1/4 of my class right now.
This occurrence makes me think twice about the people in my class. Even though we are probably the most competitive class out of all the pharm students currently there, we still extend helpful hands to each other. Though sometimes I feel like people in my class don't really care if others are falling behind (things like "we just have to do better than others on the exam"), I feel like if we ask for help, we will give it to each other. And another reason for me to like my class is what happened on Friday. My friend just randomly wanted to run for class Treasurer, and the application was due Friday by 5pm. We knew this other person whom we had talked to and hung out with before (maybe once or twice) who was running for Treasurer as well. He was kind enough to give my friend an extra application he had, even though they were going to be rivals. It was amazing, and I just love seeing this kind of compassion and helpfulness. It's touching, and maybe I'm just overly sensitive to kind feelings, but I thought, "even if people don't really know who you are or have the wrong idea about you, what you did was memorable and fair."
I guess, our class is super competitive, but fair. This should help push us to do what we are capable of doing. Reach our potential, in a sense.
