Life update : finally done with this marathon of an exam month!!! 😭
Now I'll have to wait for another month for the results to be out.
Now that I look back, the practicals were a mixed bag. We didn't have pretty much any clinical classes all throughout last year because of covid regulations, so our clinical skills are basically at the zero level, not gonna lie. We had to make do with whatever self study and watching online tutorials as we could manage. I'm banking on learning the real stuff during my upcoming internship (provided I pass in all the four subjects).
The system of examinations here is as follows : we are given real patients as "cases" to evaluate during a particular subject, eg, say, in internal medicine, a patient with ascites can be given in whom we have to take the history, do the physical examination, look at their charts and other imaging studies, and come to a possible diagnosis, plus differentials.
The people testing us are practicing docs from different hospitals all over the state, and in some cases few from outside the state, all of whom we call the "externals" (lol.... basically they can't be professors who teach us regularly).
These examiners then ask us to state and defend our diagnosis, and we're tested on clinical methods demonstrations, theory related to the condition, and face pretty much any question that the examiner feels like testing our knowledge on.
It's usually a gruelling 30 to 40 minutes of back and forth questioning per case, and at the end of it, they evaluate us under different skill sets. It's not exactly like an OSCE, but rather a kind of flexible evaluation which varies and depends on the examiner and their preferred method of questioning.
And that's just on the "cases" (usually three or four cases per subject, depending on the volume of it, eg, maximum for internal med and surgery and a little less than that in paed and obs/gyn.
Then there are crossings on instruments, hypothetical clinical scenarios, surgical specimens, radiological plates, all which have their separate marks allotted.
Basically, it's a very prolonged procedure lmao. Usually we're divided in groups of 30 to 35 students per day, and the whole exam process can go on from 9 am in the morning to 5 pm in the evening ;-; needless to say, its a very, VERY exhausting process.
Anywho.....so.....looking back, personally I think my test performance went in this order (best to worst) : surgery > paediatrics > internal medicine > obs/gynae.
Idk why.... But I flunked the OBG exam much more than I was expecting, its not that I hate the subject, it's pretty okay (and even interesting), but somehow the examiner I got for the cases, to put it plainly : I simply didn't vibe with him, you know what I mean?? He was just.....this poker faced middle aged man who seemed very bored and irritated with the world in general and my confidence just kept plummeting from the second or third question onwards.... It was just....ugh....so bad ;-;
I'm really really hoping I don't straight up fail that segment 😭
Anyway.....end of my life update. Hope y'all have been well!
and now starts my anxiety filled month of waiting for the final verdict sksksdfksjds :D
