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Module 2
With just 1 more module to go, this academic year is flying by. Taught lectures run until February and after the exam, we will be tackling our assigned project for 3 months before finishing the year. The last module was based on endocrinology which was interesting to learn; even if we did have to learn and revisit a lot of biochemistry… Module 2 is based on pregnancy and embryology and I cannot…
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Induction week: Imperial College London
Induction week: Imperial College London
As I near the end of the first week of my intercalated degree, I am beginning to realise that I should have paid a little bit more attention in the first few lectures of biochemistry in my first year of medical school! Being able to dedicate a whole year to learning about reproductive medicine has been something I wanted to do ever since I started medical school. That and being able to improve my…
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I got a degree on thursday :D
We had the graduation ceremony for our intercalated BSc's and it was pretty fun.
And what made it even better was that my dad was able to make it! YAAY! He had chemo on monday and tuesday so we were worried that he would be too ill to make it but luck was on our side that day and he was well enough to make the journey,
And I have lots of lovely photos of the day :D
It was a nice way to end this academic year. From august I will be starting back in clinical medicine and my first block back will be GP which I am excited about.
I think I'm going to do a BSc next year
Exciting stuff :)
Hopefully I'll be able to find a project i'm interested in!
One downside I can see is that it means I won't be graduating with my year, I'll be graduating a year later. Which is kind of sucky... but a lot of my friends are thinking about intercalating- 4 out of the 6 of us in our house are going to do a BSc so hopefully it will be ok.
Any of you out there intercalating/ have already intercalated?
New Year Resolutions
For the rest of my year, the now FOURTH YEARS, and lots of my friends in the year above who are the fucking FIFTH YEARS, tomorrow is the start of term. Before I get onto my resolutions I just want to say: when the fuck did this happen? On my first day of medical school I met a fourth year, who got all nostalgic over the fact that we were freshers and I remember thinking how advanced she was, how she must know so much medicine already. She was even in her clinical years and everything.
Fuck. At least I'm doing a BSc so I get an extra two weeks holiday and a year of denial, but most of the people I started with are fourth years. Jeez.
ANYWAY, as this is the start of a new beginning and whatnot, I've decided to come up with some resolutions for the academic year ahead.
Be ahead of the game. Get reading done early and get out there and start collecting data. Work hard and things completed early.
Write a fucking amazing dissertation. Do a fucking amazing project. Learn to love neuro-ophthalmology as if it's the best thing in the world, even though it's not what (currently) you want to go into as a career.
Exercise regularly. I want to take up running again, drag my housemate out to play tennis when she's not too busy with work, work on my arm flab with new dumbbells.
Climb Scafell Pike, thus completing my personal three peaks. Maybe do the three peaks challenge in May time. We were going to do it last May but it never happened.
Maintain good mental health. That is, tell housemates when feeling like crap rather than implying indirectly by shouting at them for no reason and hiding in room for unreasonable amounts of time.
Maintain contact with friends that are neither intercalating or living in my house. Also with friends who have dropped out.
Try to eat less shit and lose a tiny bit of weight. Just a little bit. My clothes are starting to become a bit tight and I'm too poor to buy new ones.
Be nicer to people.
Add five new meals to my repertoire.
Participate in NaNoWriMo. I'm aware that this might be the last year for a while where I have time to do this.
Procrastination Station... UNDER ATTACK FROM RANDOM MOTIVATION!!!
This post is really long and rambly about my life at the moment and is mostly here for my own benefit so I don't remember to do anything. Everyone, this is the boring side of being a medical student!
At least I don't have to go back to Leic for a meeting with a BSc person. She emailed me today and cancelled. I have to have a phone interview with another guy at 8.30 on Thursday (aah, also whaa?, I haven't woken up before 8.30 in ages!) to check that I'm up to speed on my genetics knowledge, which is a bit mean because we don't get taught much about genetics in med school, and it hasn't formally been taught to us since semester one, which was two years ago now (how time flies).
Anyway, that's one good thing. Down side of not going back to Leic is that I can't get my electric blanket which I left there. That would have been nice to have at home.
Ok, the reason for making this post is that I'm slipping into a rut of getting up late and doing nothing all day. It's already 1am and I'm really really tired and yet not going to sleep. The reason is that if I sleep it'll be morning and I'll have to do work.
Tomorrow, I am going to have to be more productive. I need to storm my way through a couple of early modules, ones that don't take too much time to revise. I'm thinking mechanisms of disease (though that one always ends up taking a surprisingly long time), maybe a bit of histology (usually a couple of 3 or 4 markers of histology on the exams) though I didn't bring my histology textbook home so maybe that'd be better left until nearer the time.
I also want to finally finish the freaking spinal laminae and write a bit about MS. Need to do some other condition summary pages for things that come up a lot. I think I'll do a bit of resp tomorrow.
Ok, these are the things I want to do.
Disease summary page for MS, motoneurone disease (MND), maybe a couple of other neuro things that they haven't taught us properly but will probably expect us to know.
Run through of resp, noting things I need to relearn
Start working through resp to do list.
Disease summary pages for COPD, asthma (stepwise treatment!), respiratory failure, lung cancer, blah.
Revise genetics things - CNVs, SNPs, microRNA (which is really cool, everyone should read up about it), the other thing that's a bit like miRNA but isn't and that you've forgotten. Read articles about stuff (the 2 you have open on chrome and have now bookmarked as you remember that your laptop is not as reliable as it once was)
Email audit to practice it was carried out at.
Shower
One of the key benefits of a phone interview are that I might be able to google shit as he's asking me it. Is that unethical? I think it's fair enough, after all we don't start doing projects for nearly a year, and there's plenty of time to learn things like this when I don't have a monster exam less than a month away (when did THAT happen?). Like in the first bit of clinical placements when they actually tell you to chill out a bit and enjoy yourself after two and a half years of slog. That is when I should be learning what a CNV is.
I'm just gonna spend an hour or so tomorrow surfing the genetics bits of wikipedia. Fun times.
I WILL WORK HARD. I WILL PASS MY EXAM. I WILL GO ON HOLIDAY WITH MY FRIENDS TO SOMEWHERE WARM AND NOT WORRY ABOUT PAYING RENT. I WILL SEE IF I CAN GET SOME HOURS AT WORK TO PAY FOR SAID HOLIDAY/RENT/CAR MOT/CAR TAX. I WILL SUCCEED!!!
Gogogogogo!
First step is to go to bed. It's now 1.21am, taken me about 20 mins to blurt all this out and throw my word vomit into the screen. But it's therapeutic. I'm going to start hiding all posts like this behind little "read more"s - do they make me sound mysterious?
So now for bed, and brushing my teeth, and snuggling up with a hot water bottle and think about how much better things are going than they were at the weekend when I basked my arm against the bookcase. The audit is gone and there's nothing I can do about it. I have a BSc project and maybe even two and might get to make a decision. But even if I don't get the one that is perhaps more useful for my future, at least I'll have something interesting to do.
Huzzah!
Stop being grumpy! Life is good! Remember the silver lining that was revision. Iiiit's HERE! GO RESP! GO RESP! Woooo.
I will definately not be feeling this chirpy in the morning.
Will try to get up at 9am. Dither until 10am. Do work. Start off with MS cos it's interesting and new. Then resp run through. Then lunch. Have a yummytastic lunch, possibly involving fried egg and toasted bagel (literally the BEST thing ever). Then work through resp, do extra pages and whatnot until dinner. Write some posts for tumblr about interesting things maybe. Have dinner. Then after dinner it's genetics central, maybe combined with watching TV. I'll make some notes as well so that I can refer silently to them while having my phone interview. Lols, controversial. I need to look good though due to my shitty grades.
Another 10 minutes have passed. Exactly, it's 1.32.
Ok, now I actually am going to bed. Night night tumblr!!
Having a good day
Heard back from one of the supervisors I emailed about doing an intercalated BSc, and it seems I’m the only person applying for it as he is really keen in all the emails. I’m meeting him on Friday. I’m not sure where, he just says in the “genetics department” by exit 5 of the hospital, opposite the prison. Which means literally nothing to me. I’m going to ask some people tomorrow. Apparently, finding them is “part of the challenge” which sounds, er, interesting. Ah well, we shall see! I’m still going to send my statement to the leukaemia people in case this one falls through, but it’s looking pretty promising. There’s always just the threat of bad grades hanging over me…. Surely a BSc student with sub par grades is better than no BSc student
I felt vaguely knowledgeable in group work today, which was good because it’s neuro, a module that is far too large for the time allocated to it and as a result it just sinks under itself. Anyhoo, I could remember some things that several of the guys in my group couldn’t, which made me happy. Fuck yeah respiratory centres are in the medulla. Fuck yeah the reason the guy with pontine haemorrhage has quadriparesis is because his corticospinal tracts have been squished. I think I’m the only person in the world to adore this module. If only it was better structured/more clinical.
One of our lectures today was by my favourite lecturer so yay. “Our brain has two periods programmed in for sleep in any one day. The first lasts 7 or 8 hours and occurs at night. The other is shorter, and occurs in the afternoon, right about now actually!”. And then when the fire bell went off “and that just activated all our reticular formations!” LOL neuroscience jokes (we were learning about sleep and consciousness and stuff). Tonight I’m gonna use the sleep cycle app on my iPod to see what my sleep patterns are like and analyse them. Wheee!
Our other lecture was a recorded lecture by the same guy who gave us one last week in person. Apparently he’s in South Africa at the moment - alright for some! It was an okay lecture, not really anything new. The best bit was when he made exactly the same joke he’d made last week, and told it in exactly the same way (“I don’t know if any of you get the magazine from the MDU…”) We were all going “whoooa, deja vu!”
Went to the library in the morning and learnt lots about anti-arrhythmics, felt productive. Need to finish them before I go to sleep. I’m feeling an early night tonight, which by my standards is before 1am.
Have now signed for my new house (which we’re gonna move in to next July), which I am super crazy excited about. Much as I love my room in this house, I kind of enjoy moving and putting posters up and putting stuff away in the cupboards. This’ll be my 4th address in Leicester (admittedly the first one was halls, it’s my 3rd proper address).
There are two chocolate digestives left, and I thought there was only one. YAY. Means my biscuits will make it to three days of existence, which has got to be some kind of personal record.
Intercalating Stress
WHY DO ALL THE BSC'S I WANT TO DO HAVE LOADS OF PEOPLE APPLYING FOR THEM?!?!?!
The two leukaemia ones have at least 5 people each. They want a statement of half a page to a page about why we want to do it.
The nystagmus one has 6 of us in total (though I'm pretty sure one of the guys on the email doesn't actually want to do a BSc any more). We have to submit a 2-3 page CV about our grades/awards. So I basically haven't got it because my grades are shit and I haven't won any fucking awards since I left school.
I'm now looking through the list and ticking off all the ones that might be just about bearable and emailing all those supervisors and express my interest. Because I really, really want to do a BSc and I'm terrified that I'm not going to get to do one, and it's going to mess up my clinical partnering and my mind. Because it's a whole year of my life, I don't want to do it in something that I don't find interesting.
Gah.
