Wannabe Medic

Nightmare. So some bright spark thought as well as introducing two new stations and giving us the vaguest / unclear information about them, they've decided that we should have 8 (both anatomy, all of physiology / pharmacy and communications) on one day and the two new one's on another. Today was the holy-mother-of-god 8 station day. Phys / Pharm  Just like last time we had the run down of what the physiology/pharmacy stations would be the night before. I've not refreshed my e-mail so many times in quick succession since I was waiting for track to update. The stations were decent - I was dreading an audiometry station or EMG but neither of those came up. So like last time i'll run through what they were and everything I fucked up on. Station number. Station type: whether I think i've passed or failed (how confident I am that I passed / failed) 1. Otoscope / Ophthalmoscopy:   Pass (60/40) So this station was in three parts, had to look inside the ea...

So that last week up to the Semester 3 test was pretty manic. My friends and house mates all came back from their respective home cities and the stress kicked up yet another notch; something I did not believe could happen by this point. I tell you what though, I employed a new tactic that last week. Something I have never done before. I worked with others. I am notorious for just needing to be on my own to crack on with revision, too-easily-distracted by the prospect of chatting about shit. I was apprehensive about employing this alien concept into my revision... and whilst those hours were definitely not as "progress" productive (aka it can takes three times as long to go through a topic when there are three of you) as the one's where I am on my own, it really helped cement some things in my mind. Moreover, things that I'm sure I wouldn't have remembered had we not discussed them suddenly came floating back to me in the exam. I would work on my own all day to...

It's exactly 1 week till my semester 3 exam. I can safely say it's going to be one of the toughest exams i've ever sat. When I was going my a-levels, I found them tough at the time too, but then I knew by the time the exam came around, that I had covered everything inside out. I worked really hard for them and i've worked really hard for my semester 3, but this time I have not covered everything inside out. In fact i'm not even close to covering everything.  How in gods name I will manage to scrape a pass for Semester 3 is anyone's guess and it's driving me insane. I took Christmas Eve to Boxing Day off and went home to enjoy some good food and my mothers soothing reassurance and every Wednesday and Sunday I've been doing my shifts at Waitrose (quite frankly, the only thing getting me out of the house so it has been a blessing) and besides that I've been waking up at 7am every day and working my fricking ass off. I am Showered, tea made, at m...

So about a year ago when I wrote a similar post about exam stress coming back along, I was super unsure and lost. This time around, I definitely feel more confident about what I need to do and how I need to do it but this time, the work is so much more complex (the brain. Why is it so abstract, theoretical and difficult???) and there is a great deal more to learn in depth. Saying that, I'm looking forward tremendously to revising my ass off. I'm at my student house, home, alone. The other girls have gone back for christmas so it's just me, at my desk morning till evening, occasionally having a day or morning at work, cramming everything I can in. Had it been a year ago, the loneliness and lack of social interaction would have probably been enough to drive me off of a cliff edge but this time around it's so much better. I guess that comes with maturity, being more..."adult" and entirely satisfied with one's own company. It's a great place to finally b...

This week would be my "ECE week" however I seem to have done all my placements already! So thankfully, I can finally use this time to catch a breather on what has been an overall tough semester academically. Neuroscience is incredibly interesting and I have grown to love it. Neuroanatomy will forever be something I remain in the dark with though, ha! This week I'll be revising the last few cases and hopefully getting myself organised for the last 2 weeks of term! Yesterday I had a PPD meeting (for my portfolio) but I can't help in thinking that it is just the most useless, tick boxing exercise I have ever been forced to do. Standards are kept incredibly high though, because if it's not done,  you can literally fail the preclinical years and be asked to leave. The whole course. Forever.  I've also learnt that tutors thoughts on it vary hugely too - some tutors literally only check to see if it's there without reading it, or commenting. Others (like mine)...

Here in our first two years of medical school we go on about 3-4 placements a term, usually 50/50 between GP and hospitals. This morning I had a placement in a GP surgery and a home visit. The placements we get can be very variable in terms of quality of doctor, amount of interest they have in teaching you and what you get the opportunity to do. Today, I met a brilliant partner of a GP surgery who was at the top of her game. She showed us a few things, really let us get hands on and spent some time discussing the patients with us. She was brilliant, explained things really simply and showed us what a great doctor looks like. What I really loved and appreciated though was that she took some time at the end to ask us about us.  She wanted to know our backgrounds, explored our thoughts about career prospects at a time where a lot of graduates and newly qualified's are running for the hills. I took the time to ask her about her family life. She had two photographs up on the windo...

To those of you familiar with cranial nerves, I am sure you will also be be familiar with the pneumonic above as well as the painstaking soul crushing hours one must put in to get even a vague understanding of the brain. If you aren't all that familiar, then the title of this post makes me look like a right weirdo but I promise you it's a real pneumonic! I don't know whether it is just this week or whether it's been the whole term (I can't remember one week from the next at the moment it's all blurring into one) but I am working so full on. And I don't mean like, always at university, having to do work every evening; I mean like full-on-revision-schedule-6-minimum-hours-of-studying-a-day-full-on. Has it always been like this and I've just done the bare minimum of work previously? But now I've opened up my eyes, finally have a grasp of what I need to do and now I'm just doing what everyone else was doing last year? Or is it a whole new Sem 3 thi...