Pffffft. Yes, that's the sound my brain just made.

I'm pretty sure my brain has turned to absolute mush.  When I began my Master's program I was so excited and could hardly wait to dig into the material.  That really hasn't changed.  Every morsel I read seems to get stowed away in my now carefully categorized brain.  What has changed is the amount of detail I'm putting into all of my work.  And wow, the level of work that's coming out of me.  In my undergrad years I thought I was working hard.  I would be presented a case study in one of my nutrition classes, and I thought I was rocking the assignment if I managed to point out what deficiency the patient had.  At the level I'm at right now, case studies like that look absolutely ridiculous.  Over the past few weeks I created a case study.  And when I say "created", I mean from the bottom up.  I crafted the entire patient!  Pulled him out of thin air, developed his identity, drew a time-line of the evolution of his problem, and in the end I offered solutions that I crafted from reading the current research literature on his health care conundrum.  Over the weekend I became insanely jealous of others in my class who might be working in a hospital right now.  They didn't need to go to such lengths... they had a pool of sick individuals right in front of them, and only had to pick out the most interesting one and discuss nutrition interventions to help the patient.

Does it bother me that I probably put twice as much work into my study as some others?  Nope!  Every moment of the 15 hours I devoted to that project was worth it.  I learned a lot.  For example, did you know that if you want to convert mmol/L to mg/dL in regards to LDL cholesterol, you would divide the mmol/L by 0.0259?  Did you know you divide it by something else if you're dealing with Triglycerides since the molecular weight is different?  Was is 0.0113?  The real question is do you really need to use valuable brain space to remember this?  And how do I get my eye to stop twitching from the lengths I had to go to in order to find these conversion calculations???  But honestly, I really did learn a ton, especially about my innate desire to take that mediocre undergrad mindset and stomp it out of existence in this body.