Again, I really enjoy self-directed independent learning, delving as deep into a topic as I care to go. But... occasionally it has its downsides, especially when doing literature searches on topics completely new to me. I found that it was easy to get in this hyper-ventilatory state staring at a three-inch stack of papers that seem like they might be relevant to what one needs to know, but completely filled with incomprehensible jargon and acronyms of acronyms of acronyms.
Should I now sit down and thoroughly digest this one paper or should I search farther afield for the paper I will spend two hours trying to understand? Should I go deeper and deeper into this topic or try to look at papers with similar techniques? I just want to know how this thingy interacts with that thingy, in semi-plain scientific terminology not super-duper expert abbreviations!
It only got harder when trying to look up math or even just math-ish papers, as I don't quite have a working vocabulary unless we're talking enzyme kinetics.
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It's definitely a nice change of pace to learn in a structured setting and only have to learn, without the added challenge of figuring out what topics to learn. I am not going to complain about getting a guided tour of all of human biology, histology, biochemistry, pharmacology, anatomy, pathology, embryology, science -
Oh wait, it's more like the abbreviated table of contents of the index of the abbreviated table of contents of... yeah.
But at least I'll know where to look!
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