After a student had a seizure during Professor Lawrence Principe's Organic Chemistry exam, other classmates had their tests collected while student health response units arrived on the scene.
The Hopkins Emergency Response Unit (HERU) answered head TA Tony Evans's phone call for help for sophomore Shayan Khalafi after he seized with five minutes remaining in the test period. The TAs reportedly collected exams immediately after Khalafi began seizing, because five minutes had elapsed since they had called the time warning.
Some students of the class were disappointed at the way that the test situation was handled, although they admitted that they did understand the reasons for doing so.
"It would have been nice for the TAs to give five extra minutes, but I can understand their hesitation because some people didn't even react that much to the seizure," sophomore Julia Angley said.
Angley, who is also a member of HERU, reportedly handed in her test when she saw Khalafi seizing, and went to help. She said that because the exam was almost over anyways, she had already finished and had just been checking over her answers. "I think at that level you have to be concerned about yourself, and if they knew there was nothing they could be doing, and people were helping him, and you were concerned about your grades, I understand why some kids wouldn't have helped. Personally though, that's not something that I could do," Angley said.
Following the Nov. 5 incident, a number of rumors that students in the class remained apathetic during Khalafi's seizure surfaced on JHU Confessions, Hopkins' gossip Web site.
"I could see it happening here - it's not entirely implausible. People at Hopkins get really tunnel-minded at times because the environment is so stressful," junior Aaron Jones said of the rumor.
Sophomore David Coren, a physics major, agreed with Jones, saying that the plausibility of the rumor was "not entirely out of the realm of possibility".
However, he also thought that a lot of people mis-judged the culture at Hopkins.
"If Hopkins was as cut-throat an institution as many people perceive it to be, I'd say that yes, I could see this happening, but I don't think Hopkins is really that cut-throat," he said.
Evans said that the rumor was untrue. He was working as a teaching assistant in the section when Khalafi had a seizure and said that students seemed genuinely concerned before, after and when the event occurred. "Students seemed compassionate about the situation. Some people came up to me afterwards and asked if he was alright, they did seem concerned," Evans said.
However, Evans did admit that when the incident initially occurred, the class seemed stunned and did not immediately react.
"It didn't seem like a lot of people hopped up to help right away, but there were 100 people in there and what are 100 people going to do that four people can do in that situation?" Evans asked. Evans added that students did stay to help out as well.
"I know one of his friends stayed with him after class, and there were two girls who helped also, although I don't know their relationship to him," Evans said.
Assistant TA Meredith Cline agreed.
"It was scary and shocking, we didn't really know what to do. I don't think anybody was like 'Oh we're not going to help him, we can do better', because what's one person if they do bad on their test? It doesn't mean anything. I think most people were just worried about him," Cline said.
The general response from Khalafi's classmates seemed to be of concern as well, and many students stated that they initially did not react out of shock, not out of apathy.
"I think there was a collective, 'Oh my God, what just happened' and then people came running to help," sophomore Bianca Cabri said.
"We were all just really shocked, and didn't really know what to do. I think rumors like this just kind of perpetuate that Hopkins student stereotype that we all just want to get ahead and we don't care about anyone else. I really don't think that's the case here," Cabri said.
"They're taking a test, they're in the zone. Five minutes left, they're even more into the zone, and then something just distracts them completely," said sophomore Akshay Krishnaswamy, another student who was taking the test in the same room as Khalafi.
For Krishnaswamy, his first reaction was shock
"At first it sounded like crying, so only after a few seconds did we realize he was having a seizure," he said.
"I think [the response] was partially due to the fact that students were taking a difficult exam that counts for a large part of their grade, but a lot of it also had to do with the fact that a lot of students just didn't know what to do. It was probably a mix of those things."
Krishnawamy and others also claimed that an extra, undisturbed five minutes might have been helpful to them.
"For the duration of the final five minutes, people were kind of distracted because of the seizure. I'm sure for a lot of people, that's a crucial period because a lot of stuff can click in the last couple minutes," Krishnaswamy said.
"I definitely lost my concentration . . . They could have just given us another five minutes after afterwards, they didn't have to go all out," Cabri said.
Evans speculated that Khalafi's seizure might have been brought on by not getting enough sleep or not eating healthy in the days leading up to the exam, and he said that he felt that students often get over-stressed about exams, specifically in his class.
"The culture at Hopkins is that people obviously put a lot of emphasis on [classes], and it's very competitive. Overall, I think people take it too seriously, it's not the end of the world if you don't get an A in the class, you can get B's and still get into medical school," Evans said.
Professor Christopher Falzone, who also teaches Organic Chemistry courses, said that he believes the stress and the competitive culture at Hopkins comes mostly from Hopkins being an institution with a lot of ambitious pre-meds.
"I think because we have one of the best medical schools in the country, we draw a large pre-med population. I think that large percentage has a nucleating effect for creating a competitive atmosphere," Falzone said.
"Students put this course at the center of their universe."
Krishnaswamy agreed, but he attributed the stressful environment on the structure of the Organic Chemistry courses, as well as the attitude of the professors teaching it. He claimed that a lot of students get stressed out about Organic Chemistry exams in particular because of the structure of the course. There are two midterms and a final, and those are the only grades students receive.
"There's a lot of pressure to perform on midterms as a result," Krishnaswamy said.
"Professors always say at the beginning of a semester that if you keep up, you'll do fine, and if you don't, you'll fail. They have a punishment-consequence thing, and so the myth that's propagated is that you're going to fail if you don't keep up, and more than other classes here it's really fear-driven."
However, Falzone does not think that Hopkins students are so competitive as to put their GPA's above the needs of another student.
"I've heard of students not telling others about review sessions, but I think students know that grades aren't so important as to lose a limb over," Falzone said.
Khalafi was given the option to drop this midterm grade and to just have his final grade be the average of his first midterm and his final, but he declined.
"I did extremely well on the exam, I was basically done. I was just doing an extra credit question when it happened. They gave me the option of dropping the exam, but I'm going to keep my A," Khalafi said.
Khalafi does not have a previous history of seizures or epilepsy, and the cause for this particular seizure is yet to be determined.
