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Showing posts from July, 2017

Reflecting on my SSCP

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

Reflection on juggling a job and third year

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

guess who's back, back again

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