Week 4 / Monday

On Monday morning, Larissa had an appointment at uni. Her shift supervisor had groaned but said she’d make it work, and she had, and Larissa dropped into uni to talk to them. What did they want? She didn’t know, and didn’t see any need to worry about it. Her course choices had seemed pretty straightforward – maybe they wanted to talk about her question from late last year about reorganising her prac classes so she could go to Queensland. Which would be good since that was definitely going ahead.

When she turned up to the coordinator’s office, she found the dean of animal medicine and her favourite lecturer waiting for her as well. She hadn’t seen her since the wedding, so they talked quickly about that, and the video, and its reception. Then she found out what they wanted: Ruth had got in contact with them and told them Larissa’s knowledge and experience had screamed ahead of her course, and they should figure out how to reorganise her subjects.

Whoa! But actually, that did make sense. At first, the coursework had been really hard for Larissa – learning arbitrary facts about other facts, and the reasons, and all of it disconnected from her reality. No, that wasn’t fun. It had only started to fall into place when she first saw a differential diagnosis diagram, and she’d gradually started to get a sense of what she was learning and why.

But now, after three months of advanced tutorials from Ruth in the van, anchored in the cases they’d just seen, and then four months of doing it herself, out there alone ... it was a totally different experience for her. Reading her textbooks while she was in New Zealand, it wasn’t really ‘learning’ at all – the knowledge she was reading just slotted straight into place, as if she already nearly knew it. Her practical experience, and her general framework of chemistry and physiology – she really owed Ruth! – was enough that everything she read had a place to go in her head, she knew how she would use the knowledge. Honestly, she’d found it an enjoyable experience.

The three of them grilled her about the different subjects in her course. And she knew almost everything they asked her about. Knew it inside out, often. To her surprise, she was just as good on chronic conditions as she was on acute stuff, since very often the acute stuff she dealt with was a manifestation of the chronic underlying issues. On the other hand, there were definite gaps in her knowledge and experience. Marine ... she knew nothing about that and had skipped those chapters. Surgery, she knew nothing about that, particularly endocrine stuff. Except for removing foreign bodies – she’d done that several times. After nearly an hour of grilling, they thanked her, and asked her to sit out in the reception for a while. Obviously, they were trying to figure out what to do with her.

After what seemed like ages, which she spent reading the marine chapters of her textbooks on her laptop – interesting stuff – they called her back in. Her favourite lecturer did the talking. “Well, Larissa, you’re an interesting challenge for us. It’s all quite unprecedented, in fact. Honestly, you know enough to teach most of the subjects you’re enrolled in for this year, and particularly to run the practical course work. We really don’t want you to get bored going through the motions for subjects you already know everything about.” Larissa was nodding for that, she hadn’t really thought about it. “But there’s other parts of the course that you haven’t covered at all.” Larissa agreed with that. “So, we can decide that your work counts as equivalent for some of the subjects, and just credit them to you without you actually doing them.”

Larissa looked at her in surprise. That was possible? They’d do that?

“So we made a list of the subjects, and figured out which ones that you can get credit for, and which ones you can’t. Oh – a couple of them, you’ll have to do further work for in your own time before we’d credit them to you, but we’re sure you’ll get there.” More nodding from Larissa. “But the others, you just have to do them. In particular, the research project, you have to do that.” Sure, Larissa said. “So we looked at the schedule, and we think that if you’re willing to chance it and work hard, you can finish your degree this year, instead of the end of next year, or maybe half-way through the year after that. It’ll cost you a bit more this year, but you’ll end up with less HECS debt overall, of course. Here’s what it would look like.” She showed Larissa the details, but Larissa could hardly take that in. Finish this year? What? Really? But yes, that would be great.