Wannabe Medic

At the end of third year, your final placement is a 4 week Student-Selected block. You rank your 7 most preferred along with every body else and you are matched to the highest one, depending on how many others have ranked them in a similar fashion. I really, really  wanted neonatal HDU, but ended up getting Paediatric Anaesthesia. Unbeknown to me at the time, I would be spending a fair amount of time with neonates anyway! Anaesthesia appealed to me for lots of different reasons; it's very hands on, lots of one-to-one teaching, it can be quite varied. Saying that, working with young children rather than neonates didn't really appeal to me, spending a humongous amount of time in theatre also didn't particularly lavish me with enthusiasm and so I was fairly apprehensive about this placement. I needn't worry. I've had an absolute ball. I learnt how to bag and mask tiny tiny babies, attempted (unsuccessfully) cannulation, spent time with some of the most fantastic co...

Recently, i've been going round and round in circles, trying to figure out whether it is worth keeping this job throughout fourth year. I have just finished third year and as the intensity of fourth year dawns upon me, I am weighing it all up. When I first started working at Waitrose in November 2015, I don't think I envisaged keeping the job throughout my third year. Knowing full well, I would be on placement and unsure of how structured the timetable would be (but imagining 0800-2000 shifts ha ha!), I blindly just thought i'll see how it goes. When I first received my timetable, it was clear that I couldn't work 1200-2000 every Wednesday like I had been before. I needed to reduce my hours. For the first two months, I only worked on Sundays. This was not strictly allowed - the rules were, you had  to work at least 2 days a week. So eventually they put my Wednesday shift back in, but halved the hours so it was now just from 1600-2000. I managed to keep this up all...

Dear all, sorry for my long absence - I got busy and to be honest, I knew I had to do a whopper of a post addressing how I did in the year 3 osce and just felt so daunted and exhausted by the idea that I just stopped writing. I will address the year 3 osce in more detail perhaps at some point in the near future but the long story short is that I scraped a pass. I would have been more pissed off because I worked my god damn ass off, but some of my close friends actually did fail. Also I was unsure about how to continue writing while still claiming anonymity. It's important that I do remain anonymous, but I worry that this might all come right back round to bite me so I'm aware of how careful I have to be. This anxiety made me less keen to write. At the same time, it's been a real pity to see the number of other medical student blogs have disappeared / removed. I remember what a joy they were for me to read when I was applying... Over the next few weeks, i'm going t...