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Hello to all you medics out there, and welcome to your one-stop-shop on what’s really going on at medical school. In this bimonthly blog, I’ll be sharing with all you lovely people the highs and lows of your average medical student as he stumbles his way towards (hopefully) becoming a fully-fledged doctor. To my revered older medics who have managed to pass the trials and tribulations of medical education and appear (relatively) unscarred on the other side, I salute you. Please read on to be informed of what’s happening back in the homeland, and laugh with the hilarity that a hilarious situation such as med school deserves.
To current baby medics like myself, I know you’ll treat this with great empathy. And to the future of our great profession, to the hoard of budding teens eager to throw themselves into the fray of admissions tests, personal statements and interviews, this is a shout-out just for you guys. Treat this blog as a truthful taster of what awaits you in the hallowed halls of whatever bastion of medical education you seek to enrol yourself in. I’m sure you’ve been told time and time again that it doesn’t matter which uni you end up at, both the end result and the experience will be the same. Having shared war stories with friends and family at fine institutions of medical education the country over, I assure you that’s true. Therefore I can say with (almost) complete certainty that my stories will ring true for med schools up and down the UK.
And now to my current position. Back at home, recovering from my first year in that magical kingdom known as medical school and slightly bored out of my mind. Just over a month ago I was mid exams, suffering from 6:30 wake-ups, 12 hour shifts in the library and all-round lack of a social life. I promised myself that once I was out of this rather unhappy situation I wouldn’t look back, however I find myself at home suffering from that lesser-known med student syndrome – the post-exam blues. Never before had I thought that Alice, having escaped Wonderland, would be so keen to abandon reality and jump right back down the rabbit hole.
So, one year down and I reckon if someone was to collapse in front of me on the street tomorrow I’d leg it in the other direction. ABC might as well have been taught to me in Ancient Greek for all I remember [insert all Greek to me joke here], but I convince myself this is fair considering I have 5 more years of jedi training to go. After that I’m let loose on the general population with the rest of the padawan cohort.
Over the next few blogs I’ll be summing up my first year in the hope that future mini medics may laugh and learn from my mistakes. Just to set the scene for you, I’m lucky enough (or unlucky enough, I haven’t decided yet) to be at uni in London, which presents a whole host of problems in and of itself. It turns out that getting to make a whole new city my own was one of the best parts of my year, so I’ll tell you a bit about that as well.
As a survivor of a series of boarding schools I considered myself suitably trained for checking out of Hotel Mum and Dad and out into the real world. I have never been more wrong. To give you an example I was nearly an hour late for registration due to having a more than generous amount of faith in Transport for London, so I was off to a cracking start. I was lucky enough to fall pretty quickly into a friendship group of lovely, like-minded individuals which made the whole of Fresher’s a wonderful experience (to be continued). From being crushed in a crowd of sweaty students at Fresher’s Fair to a 3 hour admin lecture so boring it actually reduced someone to tears, I learnt things aren’t so bad if you’ve got your mates suffering alongside you.
Thus concludes the inaugural blog of my moment of mini medic madness. Next time I’ll be sharing with you my Fresher’s experience, including a list of do’s and don’ts that’ll help you navigate the ocean of Fresher’s and find yourself in a safe harbour at the end. Medic love, T.
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