It appears that the first year of university is drawing to a close. A year ago, the butterflies were in my stomach as I started to prepare myself for the exciting adventures I had ahead of me at university and now the butterflies are back as I prepare myself for the upcoming exams that await me after Easter. As I sit down to write this I am thinking how much we actually learn in the first year. I had very little experience with lenses and ray-traces used to scare the daylight out of me. Now I'm fairly confident in working out dispensing problems and ray-traces are suddenly my friend, not my foe. We've also learned a wide amount of biology-related content that is relevant to the course. Some fascinating lectures on embryology, the various systems in the body and how everything just seems to work has made me think about the world and life in a whole new light. On Friday I was lucky enough (well I say lucky...it was pretty strange) to visit the biosciences building and to witness a human head and neck dissection. Despite the horrible feelings that kept crossing my mind that these were once people, it did offer an amazing insight to how all of these structures were arranged in the human - even more fascinating was observing the eyes themselves, something we could offer direct comparison to our bovine eye reports. Many of us felt that we understood the content a whole lot better after witnessing this, than we did from lectures and reading alone. So, although the lectures have all finished, now is the time to consolidate the knowledge and revise. It will be a tough, we've gone from having lots of work and no free time to lots of free time and as much work as we can do within it. All it takes is a good discipline and I'm sure it will be fine. Saying that, I had better get revising for my dispensing practical exam! I'll be happy when it's over with!