Nia spread her Maasai shuka beneath the wide canopy of a Nile Tulip, its yellow blossoms scattered like confetti across the manicured lawn behind the science complex. She lay on her side, one arm tucked beneath her head, the other resting across her ribs. Overhead, the branches swayed gently, dappling her skin with shifting patches of light. She listened to the rattling chatter of a Cisticola, and a distant metallic whistle that might’ve been a Starling.

And then she recalled every single detail with crystal clarity.

Two hours earlier, the exam had started like they always did. Nia skimmed through the paper, scribbling brief cues beside each question. As usual, she began with the ones she felt confident about. The plan was to work quickly and return to the tougher sections. However, somewhere between question three and four, she began second-guessing. “Maybe that’s not quite right…”She found herself rewriting and sometimes even correcting answers that had been accurate the first time. By the time she circled back to the difficult questions, an hour and a half had already passed.

“There isn’t enough time to cover these hard questions,” she thought.

She started to rush through, but her mind went blank. She couldn’t recall the information or organize her ideas into anything coherent. Minutes slipped by as she stared blankly at the questions. She then started feeling fatigue and trembling in her arm smudged her writing. Her left hand felt cold while her right felt uncomfortably warm. Students around her began turning in their exam booklets. She looked up and realized, “Oh my God, there is only twenty minutes left, and I haven’t even started the last question!”

She had expected to leave the exam room feeling confident and accomplished, and yet, as she lets go of that paper, a wave of frustration engulfed her because she had done everything she could. She had attended most lectures and filled her notebooks with bullet points and color-coded cues. She had even created sticky notes with questions to chase down later. Beyond the assigned readings, she devoted extra time to reviewing material, refining biochemical pathways and metabolic cycles, and self-testing to deepen her understanding.

She wasn’t alone either. She studied alongside her two study mates, Mose and Rozie, both of whom were remarkably intelligent. Mose enjoyed tutoring, which made sense considering his dream of becoming a lecturer one day.

Looking back, Nia couldn’t imagine what college would have been like without them. However, she dreaded the post-semester results discussions because Mose and Rozie always performed better making her feel so insecure, embarrassed and like an imposter.

Am I just working this hard to keep up? she’d wonder. Or am I actually capable?

It was frustrating that her test scores rarely reflected her true abilities.

During one of their group discussions, Mose leaned forward, reaching for his water bottle. “I blanked on that question about tumorigenesis,” he admitted.

Rozie raised her eyebrows in agreement. “Same here. That question caught me off guard too. I just wrote what I could remember and hoped for partial marks.”

Nia nodded along. “Yeah… that one was tough,” she said quietly, even though she hadn’t even made it that far in the paper.

As they moved on to discuss the next topic, Nia found comfort in the thought that maybe blank moments were normal and it never occurred to her to seek help.

---

Outside the lecture halls, a different kind of pressure was building. Would Nia ever feel like she belonged in the work she’d trained so hard for? Stay tuned as she steps into the medical world…