The Things I Used to Know

Tonight I have been going through my old notebooks and papers that I wrote in undergrad and for my Master's. I came across such things as Brain and Behavior, Cognitive Neuroscience, Introduction to Clinical Psychology, Personality Psychology, and Cognitive Development. I enjoyed most of those classes and thought I learned a lot at the time. But going through these things several years later, I'm left wondering how much I actually retained. In these notebooks I found terms like "crystallized and fluid intelligence" (something I learned about last fall in my clinical coursework. I even found the terms "nomothetic" and "idiographic" -- two words I learned earlier this spring (or so I thought). It is sort of frightening to me to realize that at one point I knew things that during these past 2 years of graduate school I believed I was learning for the first time. It would have surprised me less to have this experience with notes from a year ago, because throughout grad school, I have found it harder to retain the things I learn. But in undergrad, I thought it was getting engrained a lot more solidly in my brain. Apparently, I was wrong :-p.