On Cramming for Exams in Romania and Taking a Damaging Supplement

A professor suggested I take this vitamin to be able to focus better. I didn’t give it a second thought.

Once upon a time, I was a very enthusiastic student who placed a lot of belief in cramming. So to prepare for the entrance examination to university, where I had to take a history exam, among others, I spent a summer trying to remember loads of data, as that was how the history exam was administered: nothing on critical thinking and everything about what artifacts were discovered where and who participated in what, regardless of whether those names spoke much to us students or not.

In the meantime, as you can see, I moved to more creative pursuits, but at the time, I didn’t know what to study in university and figured law could be a good career for me. The other option was foreign languages and literature, but law seemed more challenging, and besides, the exams were history and Romanian language.

I recall little of the specific forms of the grammar and other components (vocabulary, spelling, usage) of the Romanian language exam, but I remember the multiple-choice questions of the history exam as being very tricky. You could have, for instance, as homes for certain discoveries of third-century artifacts, either six places or seven places, listed as the “a” and “b” options. If you didn’t know the whole list by heart, you couldn’t answer correctly. Same thing with names and places and dates for battles, and so on.

I had to basically memorize two large textbooks full of data.

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That said, please don’t do what I did.

To make a long story short — and the long story involves a high-school professor I saw on weekends for tutorials, someone who handed out multiple-choice test sheets and didn’t impart any knowledge besides correcting them; we also didn’t make it very far in the textbooks with those test sheets — I eventually landed in the home of an esteemed university professor, who had antique cupboards lined with old tomes, along with a penchant for helping me become able to parse through all that data and come out of it a little richer in knowledge. She also shared lots of interesting historical vignettes, which truly made so much in those textbooks come alive.

Along with all that, she suggested I take some pyridoxine (vitamin B6) supplements since we had a lot to cover in only one summer.

I don’t know what I did that summer about that pyridoxine, whether I took it or not, but I suspect I didn’t. I do know that I passed a very difficult entrance exam.

Eight months passed, and at the end of my first year in law school, I remembered about that pyridoxine, and without thinking twice about it, I decided to take some to help me cram all the info from the second semester and some from the first semester as well during the month-long exam session.

It was a very unfortunate decision. Before the month was over, those B6 supplements hit high gear, and I couldn’t sleep for two nights right before my final exam. It felt next to impossible to cram everything in five or six days without my much-needed sleep, and I really didn’t think I would be able to sit for that final exam. I was exhausted both mentally and physically and couldn’t imagine myself actually walking to the university building, let alone being able to access my brain for the very structured and detailed exam info (civil law).

Then an aunt of mine gave me something (who knows what that was), and I was able to sleep for about an hour — just enough to be able to gather some new strength and go take that exam.

It was an awful experience, the result of a misguided recommendation on the part of a professor who should have known better than to dole out this kind of advice.

It was also the result of my trying to cram everything in a very short period of time. I thought it was okay because everybody did that. Turns out, sometimes you have to make up your own rules in life.

And, on a related note, sometimes it’s okay to question even the advice of some doctors and go see other doctors. Everybody can make errors in judgment, and even though it’s good and helpful to trust medical professionals, for instance, it helps to become more and more acquainted with your body yourself, so you can have a more informed dialogue with your doctors — among other things. You may not understand your body from a scientific perspective as others do, but it may tell you things about itself others can’t hear.

I am sure my body, too, was trying to tell me that it was getting too restless from that pyridoxine, but at that time, I wasn’t listening because my mind was so very focused on my studies.

The moral of the story is, for me: don’t ever get so focused that you can’t hear what your body needs.

I hope there’s something in this story for you as well, as writers, too, can push themselves quite far sometimes.

The golden word and notion is balance. Some stress is good, but try to keep some semblance of balance so your writing and other focused activities are sustainable.

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To a happier, healthier life,

Mira