I've thought about specialities, but I'm not 100% sure what I want to pursue just yet. Specialities I'm considering at the moment are Paediatrics (top of my list!) and Obs & Gynae. In 3rd year we experience general Medicine and it's in 4th year that we experience clinical specialities so I've actually not experienced any of the specialities I'm considering yet, so I'm hoping next year will give me a better idea of what I want to do. I am pretty fixed on hospital Medicine over community though.
Taking notes on an iPad is sooo efficient! I actually started taking iPad notes this year (3rd year of medical school) and I made everything do-able on the iPad, so much so that I really had no need for a laptop anymore.
The main app I used for note-taking was GoodNotes. I have a notebook for each speciality in which I make brief handwritten notes. I also created myself a bit of a "history taking template" on there so I was really easy to make notes on a patient's history as I was talking to them. If you have an iPad I'd highly recommend getting a stylus/Apple Pencil to go with it because it's so much easier to make notes on the ward and it also means you'll be able to maintain eye contact with patients whilst scribbling away (which would be a bit difficult to do if you were typing the notes).
In 3rd year I didn't type up a whole document of notes as I did for the years before, instead I put everything on to flashcards, so I had a the Quizlet app on my iPad as well. I also downloaded any textbooks I thought might be useful, the PDF version of the Oxford Handbook on to my iPad so I had easy access to everything on there.
I didn't use a huge amount of external resources for clinical years because Manchester give us TCD (Themed Case Discussion) cases which are similar to PBL but the entire case is online and you're made to work through lectures and resources and you essentially have everything you need to know on there. Some other resources I did find helpful though are:
Focussed History Taking for OSCEs textbook - this is a must-have if you're starting clinical years, it goes through different types of histories, questions you should be asking, differentials to consider. History taking really is the crux of 3rd year so using it will help so much.
Oxford Handbook of clinical Medicine - you probably knew this one already or you might even have it! I didn't use it an awful lot but when I did it was so useful. I kept telling myself I needed to use it more throughout the year.
Geeky Medics + OSCE stop websites - great for clinical stuff, great for OSCEs and revision
Essential Examination book - a lot of people found this book quite helpful. I bought it but didn't really use it because at the beginning of third year we are given an excellent eBook with everything Manchester wants you to know for the physical examinations. If you want to learn extra signs and little bits I can see it being really useful though
Third year is quite different to first and second and you really need to begin it before you can get a feel of how to revise and how you learn. Clinical medicine does need to be learnt surrounding the clinical environment so there won’t be a lot you’ll be able to do to help yourself in advance. It is a lot busier than 1st and 2nd, but at the same time you don't have to spend as much time with your head in a book revising - instead you learn a lot just by being present and hearing things being said to you again and again.
The only thing that I can think of that would have helped is learning the physical examinations from year 1 and 2 inside out. Learning all the signs you’re looking for with each part of the examination and even practising it with family and friends if possible. You're not really re-taught these examinations again in 3rd year and when you're asked to do one in front of a consultant during your bedside teaching session if you know the flow and know what you're looking for you'll get so much more out of it and be able to focus on picking up some of the pathological signs.
Looking over 1st and 2nd year content won’t help as in third year you re-cover the conditions but from a more clinical perspective, so I wouldn't say it'd help to revise over PBL or anything like that.
Surgery and Cardiology have been my favourite placements. Your view on a speciality is quite heavily influenced by the teaching you receive so it's no surprise that both those 2 block had excellent teaching for me at my hospital.
Surgery was so busy, but going into theatres was so exciting, getting scrubbed up and you can even go a step further and help with suturing if you're keen. The clinics in Surgery were also really interactive so I could take a history from every patient that came, present it and have a go at coming up with some differentials. We also had a lot of teaching on surgery - a few bedside teaching sessions a week and I learnt a lot from each one which made it stand out so much!
Cardiology also had incredible teaching - we were able to go into the Cath lab, there was also such a variety of conditions we were able to see, I even got to meet a patient with Takustubo Cardiomyopathy (= "broken heart syndrome" which is quite rare) whilst I was there!
To be completely honest, no day in clinical medicine is the same. At my base hospital we get to choose our own timetables so can sign up to clinics and ward rounds as we please. Ward rounds are always in the morning and depending on what clinical speciality you're in clinics can be in the morning or in the afternoon or throughout the day.
On a particular day you might have a ward round in the morning followed by bedside teaching in the afternoon or a clinic in the afternoon. Some days you might choose to keep the morning free so you can get on with some revision or so you can go to the ward and get some of your skills signed off for the block, take patient histories, practise some examinations. Or you might have signed up or a ward round in the morning but have to leave after a couple of hours to go for a bedside teaching session and then you might have decided to keep your afternoon free. Every day is different and it's really flexible to how you want to plan your time.
Every block (every 4 weeks) we have to do at least 4 clinics and 4 ward rounds (+ 4 theatres if you're in surgery). I tend to front-load my blocks so I'm doing a lot more at the beginning and have more free time near the end of the block.
The only day of the week we don't really have "clinical time" is on Friday because that's the day we have our formal teaching. We have 2 sessions on Fridays - one to close out TCD case and another for other components of the programme such as ethics, communication skills etc.
Ohhh I have loads of tips for getting through 3rd year...I actually brain-splurged some ideas the other day for an upcoming blog post and I counted 25 tips I had listed to get through 3rd year; more or less all from things I wish I had done more of throughout the year! And...I still have more, so at some point that shall be finished and uploaded.
But for now, from the top of my head: number one tip for third year would be to practise practise practise! I know it sounds obvious but once you start the year it's easy to see your sign offs as just a tick box exercise and not bother doing anymore after you've completed the minimum requirements. Instead you should try and take every opportunity to get as much practice as possible. 3rd year really isn't so much about the knowledge, it's about getting really good at taking histories and being able to examine and actually recognise signs - both of these things will only come with repeated practice. The more time you put into it slowly throughout the year, the more thankful you'll be when it comes up to exams.
Finally, don't get het up about not knowing things in 3rd year - there's a lot you won't know and to be honest nobody really expects it of you. 3rd year's all about getting used to the clinical environment (and in my opinion is more more relaxed than 1st and 2nd) so just spend that extra time on the wards with a mindset to osmose everything around you (osmosis really is the way you'll learn most things! 😂)
Volume of content is by far the biggest struggle. When I was in first year one of the best pieces of advice I received was from an older student about knowing that you can't know everything. This advice is truly golden and I've taken it with me through medical school so far. Medicine is so vast and if you tried to learn things completely there'd never be an end. Instead it really is about being able to actively decide " I don't need to know this - it's not going to clinically help me at the stage I'm at now so I'm not going to learn it".
I'm not saying do that to everything because there is a lot we do need to know now, but making smart decisions and putting effort into learning things proportionate to their value for your stage is key.
Balancing other things as a medical student is really not as hard as I feel a lot of people think. Medicine does take time, but for me I do always have free time to spend on doing other things, the blog being one of them. I kind of see blogging and medicine as 2 separate priorities so one can't eat into the time of the other. They both have their own list of tasks to be done and I'll make sure I'm consistently spending a bit of time on both.
I don't know how well I balance it to be honest though. I remember when I was living in Manchester I relished all that alone time in my room because it really allowed me to get the flow of writing and I was adding to the blog very regularly then, probably a bit too much. I have a distinct memory of me writing yet another a blog post for that day and then my flatmate coming in to my room saying "Have you started PBL yet? I think you should be doing PBL instead of writing a blog post." 😂 So take it as you will, I do spend a huge amount of time on my blog, but at the same time the PBL cases did finish themselves. I think if you're going to put time into something else (i.e. blogging) you have to know that you'll be able to sacrifice time elsewhere for Medicine.
You have a beautiful blog and instagram, do you have any tips on managing your blog, social media and other extra curriculars alongside your studies? How do you manage your time?
General tips for managing social media/blogging would be to plan ahead. The medicine course is quite predictable in the sense that I know what my timetable looks like, I know when my exams are hence the times that I'm likely to be more busy so I can pre-prepare content that'll be relevant for those time periods. Consistency is key in the internet world! I've kind of slackened a little now, but in my second year of med school I think all my blog posts were scheduled, meaning I wrote them weeks before the publication date.
Time management wise, to-do lists have saved my sanity time and time again; planning out my time by setting away chunks of time of different activities helps me a lot.
Ahaha...my desk is not always tidy. De-cluttering has had to become a daily habit, but if I leave it for one day it does quite easily start to look like I've emptied all my drawers on top of it! 😂
This question made me laugh because though I LOVE clinical placements, a feeling of uncomfortableness comes with them too. You feel like you're in the middle of the ward, occupying space, wasting people's time, blocking people from doing their jobs some of the time. A lot of the time on clinical placements you're following a doctor and you don't play a role in patient care at all so I suppose it is natural to feel uncomfortable or in the way.
So I messaged some of my friends about this question, because clinical placements really do come with a feeling of not knowing what to do with yourself and I just wanted to share some of the common scenarios of awkwardness/uncomfortableness they shared because they just made me laugh:
"Going up and down the ward trying to pluck up the courage to ask a a patient if they’ll talk to you." 😆
"Trying to look like you're occupied on your iPad in the middle of the ward so it doesn't look like you're literally stood there doing nothing."
"The same nurse seeing you on your exercise run of pacing the ward for the 20th time because you're too scared to ask the pharmacist if they can sign off your prescribing task." 😂😭
"Stood near one of the walls wishing you could become invisible, because of the sheer awkwardness of standing in the middle of a ward doing nothing."
"Being told to get something during a ward round and stressing because it’s taking you too long and you don’t know the code to the clean utility." 😭😭
"Being told to get something on a ward round only to come back and realise the ward round has disappeared from the face of the Earth."
"Being rejected by a patient and dying of shame when the entire bay hears the rejection." 🤣
"Being in a state of anxiety in case you’re told to auscultate on a ward round because you know it’ll take you ten years to get the stethoscope into your ears the right way round."
"When you answer a question wrong in front of the patient...and the entire ward round!" 😫
Jokes aside, clinical placements are great and with only being in the clinical environment for a year we can't expect to feel completely comfortable. I do think over time you adjust more and the uncomfortableness does become a more of background feeling rather than a prominent one. Also, the more you engage, ask questions etc the more involved and better you feel.
Haha, it’s not like work experience though, because the doctors are always trying to involve you and trying to take time out to teach whenever they can. Placements are genuinely really enjoyable and you learn so much from them!
Ohh... not the best person again, my CV hasn't massively expanded since I started medical school. I think if you know for sure what you want to do in the future you can easily engage in events, attend extra lectures via societies, go to conferences relevant to your desired speciality. At the moment I'm not 100% sure so I've just engaged in whatever interests me so any additional things I've done are from all sorts of different areas and not focussed or geared to a specific career path.
You've caught me in the height of my indecisiveness: can you believe I'm still trying to decide whether to intercalate or not! The deadline is less than 10 days away and after a whole year of going to and fro I'm still sitting on the fence about whether I should put an application in... 😐
It's really helpful if you can choose an intercalation course based on what you want to do in the future as that way it's directly relevant. However, in terms of giving you points when applying for foundation programmes, the subject content doesn't matter at all. The main thing you should use to choose a course is simply the one you think you'll enjoy and find the most interesting! You don't want to take a year out of Medicine to find yourself bored and your intercalated degree will have high expectations to live up to meet the engagement that Medicine does. Go with your gut and what genuinely intrigues you over anything else. Speak to students who've done the courses to get an idea of how they teach, modules they cover etc.
I started my blog before I applied for medicine as a way to keep track and encourage myself to reflect regularly on my experiences. Over the years the content on my blog has evolved a fair bit and gone from just being based around my reflections to including advice/tips posts. It was in the first year of med school that I decided to open an associated instagram account because I wanted to share more of the smaller day-to-day experiences of going through medical school, little things that I couldn't really write a whole blog post about...and so the instagram was born! 😆
Are there any opportunities to get involved in research projects and getting them published outside of the course modules/assignments? If so, how would you go about doing it?
Beyond PEP (the research strand as part of Manchester's course) I haven't done any other independent research, so I can't advise much on this I'm afraid.
The 3rd year PEP is quite a significant research project and one that a lot of people do submit for publication, but unfortunately our one had to be cancelled due to Covid.
Intercalation also brings up another opportunity to do research and get published - so that's another option.
Has to be the 8 Worst People You Could Be In PBL post - written so well and each category brings a stream of people to mind (myself included 👀). Great article! 😂
I've actually not been that productive in lockdown, I've been enjoying some downtime and am taking each day as it comes rather than bombarding myself with strict timetables and huge lists of things to do. I'm trying to be a little bit more productive and make sure I'm keeping up with some Medicine by slowly working through some online cases we've been given. I've also weirdly found I'm a lot more productive after 4am, so if there's anything I really need to do I've been using the time between 4-7am to do it and then going to bed after that.
I know...I'm living with an insane sleeping schedule right now, but seeing as there's no need to actually wake up early in the mornings each day it's working for me to sleep right through the mornings and wake up mid-afternoon.
I'm also trying to use my planner to create a bit more structure to the day: I usually find it helps to block off time to focus on certain things so am attempting some more of that. However, I'm having a much more flexible approach to it, I know if I try and force myself to do too much nothing will get done.
Have you thought about what specialty you would like to pursue when you have qualified
I've thought about specialities, but I'm not 100% sure what I want to pursue just yet. Specialities I'm considering at the moment are Paediatrics (top of my list!) and Obs & Gynae. In 3rd year we experience general Medicine and it's in 4th year that we experience clinical specialities so I've actually not experienced any of the specialities I'm considering yet, so I'm hoping next year will give me a better idea of what I want to do. I am pretty fixed on hospital Medicine over community though.
@lifeofamedic that makes sense
How do you optimise your iPad to take notes - is it efficient?
Taking notes on an iPad is sooo efficient! I actually started taking iPad notes this year (3rd year of medical school) and I made everything do-able on the iPad, so much so that I really had no need for a laptop anymore.
The main app I used for note-taking was GoodNotes. I have a notebook for each speciality in which I make brief handwritten notes. I also created myself a bit of a "history taking template" on there so I was really easy to make notes on a patient's history as I was talking to them. If you have an iPad I'd highly recommend getting a stylus/Apple Pencil to go with it because it's so much easier to make notes on the ward and it also means you'll be able to maintain eye contact with patients whilst scribbling away (which would be a bit difficult to do if you were typing the notes).
In 3rd year I didn't type up a whole document of notes as I did for the years before, instead I put everything on to flashcards, so I had a the Quizlet app on my iPad as well. I also downloaded any textbooks I thought might be useful, the PDF version of the Oxford Handbook on to my iPad so I had easy access to everything on there.
@lifeofamedic Is GoodNotes free?
@Maria Chowdhury No, unfortunately it isn't. I think it's about £7, but you'll use it so much it'll easily be worth every penny.
What are some of the best resources to use during clinical years?
I didn't use a huge amount of external resources for clinical years because Manchester give us TCD (Themed Case Discussion) cases which are similar to PBL but the entire case is online and you're made to work through lectures and resources and you essentially have everything you need to know on there. Some other resources I did find helpful though are:
Focussed History Taking for OSCEs textbook - this is a must-have if you're starting clinical years, it goes through different types of histories, questions you should be asking, differentials to consider. History taking really is the crux of 3rd year so using it will help so much.
Oxford Handbook of clinical Medicine - you probably knew this one already or you might even have it! I didn't use it an awful lot but when I did it was so useful. I kept telling myself I needed to use it more throughout the year.
Geeky Medics + OSCE stop websites - great for clinical stuff, great for OSCEs and revision
Essential Examination book - a lot of people found this book quite helpful. I bought it but didn't really use it because at the beginning of third year we are given an excellent eBook with everything Manchester wants you to know for the physical examinations. If you want to learn extra signs and little bits I can see it being really useful though
Tips on how to prepare for clinical years?
Third year is quite different to first and second and you really need to begin it before you can get a feel of how to revise and how you learn. Clinical medicine does need to be learnt surrounding the clinical environment so there won’t be a lot you’ll be able to do to help yourself in advance. It is a lot busier than 1st and 2nd, but at the same time you don't have to spend as much time with your head in a book revising - instead you learn a lot just by being present and hearing things being said to you again and again.
The only thing that I can think of that would have helped is learning the physical examinations from year 1 and 2 inside out. Learning all the signs you’re looking for with each part of the examination and even practising it with family and friends if possible. You're not really re-taught these examinations again in 3rd year and when you're asked to do one in front of a consultant during your bedside teaching session if you know the flow and know what you're looking for you'll get so much more out of it and be able to focus on picking up some of the pathological signs.
Looking over 1st and 2nd year content won’t help as in third year you re-cover the conditions but from a more clinical perspective, so I wouldn't say it'd help to revise over PBL or anything like that.
Which of your placements have you enjoyed the most?
Surgery and Cardiology have been my favourite placements. Your view on a speciality is quite heavily influenced by the teaching you receive so it's no surprise that both those 2 block had excellent teaching for me at my hospital.
Surgery was so busy, but going into theatres was so exciting, getting scrubbed up and you can even go a step further and help with suturing if you're keen. The clinics in Surgery were also really interactive so I could take a history from every patient that came, present it and have a go at coming up with some differentials. We also had a lot of teaching on surgery - a few bedside teaching sessions a week and I learnt a lot from each one which made it stand out so much!
Cardiology also had incredible teaching - we were able to go into the Cath lab, there was also such a variety of conditions we were able to see, I even got to meet a patient with Takustubo Cardiomyopathy (= "broken heart syndrome" which is quite rare) whilst I was there!
What is an average day in clinical years like?
To be completely honest, no day in clinical medicine is the same. At my base hospital we get to choose our own timetables so can sign up to clinics and ward rounds as we please. Ward rounds are always in the morning and depending on what clinical speciality you're in clinics can be in the morning or in the afternoon or throughout the day.
On a particular day you might have a ward round in the morning followed by bedside teaching in the afternoon or a clinic in the afternoon. Some days you might choose to keep the morning free so you can get on with some revision or so you can go to the ward and get some of your skills signed off for the block, take patient histories, practise some examinations. Or you might have signed up or a ward round in the morning but have to leave after a couple of hours to go for a bedside teaching session and then you might have decided to keep your afternoon free. Every day is different and it's really flexible to how you want to plan your time.
Every block (every 4 weeks) we have to do at least 4 clinics and 4 ward rounds (+ 4 theatres if you're in surgery). I tend to front-load my blocks so I'm doing a lot more at the beginning and have more free time near the end of the block.
The only day of the week we don't really have "clinical time" is on Friday because that's the day we have our formal teaching. We have 2 sessions on Fridays - one to close out TCD case and another for other components of the programme such as ethics, communication skills etc.
Any tips for going into 3rd year?
Ohhh I have loads of tips for getting through 3rd year...I actually brain-splurged some ideas the other day for an upcoming blog post and I counted 25 tips I had listed to get through 3rd year; more or less all from things I wish I had done more of throughout the year! And...I still have more, so at some point that shall be finished and uploaded.
But for now, from the top of my head: number one tip for third year would be to practise practise practise! I know it sounds obvious but once you start the year it's easy to see your sign offs as just a tick box exercise and not bother doing anymore after you've completed the minimum requirements. Instead you should try and take every opportunity to get as much practice as possible. 3rd year really isn't so much about the knowledge, it's about getting really good at taking histories and being able to examine and actually recognise signs - both of these things will only come with repeated practice. The more time you put into it slowly throughout the year, the more thankful you'll be when it comes up to exams.
Finally, don't get het up about not knowing things in 3rd year - there's a lot you won't know and to be honest nobody really expects it of you. 3rd year's all about getting used to the clinical environment (and in my opinion is more more relaxed than 1st and 2nd) so just spend that extra time on the wards with a mindset to osmose everything around you (osmosis really is the way you'll learn most things! 😂)
What is the hardest thing you have experienced during medical school and how did you tackle it?
Volume of content is by far the biggest struggle. When I was in first year one of the best pieces of advice I received was from an older student about knowing that you can't know everything. This advice is truly golden and I've taken it with me through medical school so far. Medicine is so vast and if you tried to learn things completely there'd never be an end. Instead it really is about being able to actively decide " I don't need to know this - it's not going to clinically help me at the stage I'm at now so I'm not going to learn it".
I'm not saying do that to everything because there is a lot we do need to know now, but making smart decisions and putting effort into learning things proportionate to their value for your stage is key.
How do you balance being a medical student and having an amazing blog website?
Thank you! 😄
Balancing other things as a medical student is really not as hard as I feel a lot of people think. Medicine does take time, but for me I do always have free time to spend on doing other things, the blog being one of them. I kind of see blogging and medicine as 2 separate priorities so one can't eat into the time of the other. They both have their own list of tasks to be done and I'll make sure I'm consistently spending a bit of time on both.
I don't know how well I balance it to be honest though. I remember when I was living in Manchester I relished all that alone time in my room because it really allowed me to get the flow of writing and I was adding to the blog very regularly then, probably a bit too much. I have a distinct memory of me writing yet another a blog post for that day and then my flatmate coming in to my room saying "Have you started PBL yet? I think you should be doing PBL instead of writing a blog post." 😂 So take it as you will, I do spend a huge amount of time on my blog, but at the same time the PBL cases did finish themselves. I think if you're going to put time into something else (i.e. blogging) you have to know that you'll be able to sacrifice time elsewhere for Medicine.
You have a beautiful blog and instagram, do you have any tips on managing your blog, social media and other extra curriculars alongside your studies? How do you manage your time?
Thank you so much! :)
General tips for managing social media/blogging would be to plan ahead. The medicine course is quite predictable in the sense that I know what my timetable looks like, I know when my exams are hence the times that I'm likely to be more busy so I can pre-prepare content that'll be relevant for those time periods. Consistency is key in the internet world! I've kind of slackened a little now, but in my second year of med school I think all my blog posts were scheduled, meaning I wrote them weeks before the publication date.
Time management wise, to-do lists have saved my sanity time and time again; planning out my time by setting away chunks of time of different activities helps me a lot.
How do you keep your table so clean??
He needs the tips 😂
Ahaha...my desk is not always tidy. De-cluttering has had to become a daily habit, but if I leave it for one day it does quite easily start to look like I've emptied all my drawers on top of it! 😂
Have you ever felt uncomfortable on placements and how did you deal with it?
This question made me laugh because though I LOVE clinical placements, a feeling of uncomfortableness comes with them too. You feel like you're in the middle of the ward, occupying space, wasting people's time, blocking people from doing their jobs some of the time. A lot of the time on clinical placements you're following a doctor and you don't play a role in patient care at all so I suppose it is natural to feel uncomfortable or in the way.
So I messaged some of my friends about this question, because clinical placements really do come with a feeling of not knowing what to do with yourself and I just wanted to share some of the common scenarios of awkwardness/uncomfortableness they shared because they just made me laugh:
"Going up and down the ward trying to pluck up the courage to ask a a patient if they’ll talk to you." 😆
"Trying to look like you're occupied on your iPad in the middle of the ward so it doesn't look like you're literally stood there doing nothing."
"The same nurse seeing you on your exercise run of pacing the ward for the 20th time because you're too scared to ask the pharmacist if they can sign off your prescribing task." 😂😭
"Stood near one of the walls wishing you could become invisible, because of the sheer awkwardness of standing in the middle of a ward doing nothing."
"Being told to get something during a ward round and stressing because it’s taking you too long and you don’t know the code to the clean utility." 😭😭
"Being told to get something on a ward round only to come back and realise the ward round has disappeared from the face of the Earth."
"Being rejected by a patient and dying of shame when the entire bay hears the rejection." 🤣
"Being in a state of anxiety in case you’re told to auscultate on a ward round because you know it’ll take you ten years to get the stethoscope into your ears the right way round."
"When you answer a question wrong in front of the patient...and the entire ward round!" 😫
Jokes aside, clinical placements are great and with only being in the clinical environment for a year we can't expect to feel completely comfortable. I do think over time you adjust more and the uncomfortableness does become a more of background feeling rather than a prominent one. Also, the more you engage, ask questions etc the more involved and better you feel.
@lifeofamedic wow I thought being on work experience was awkward enough lol
Haha, it’s not like work experience though, because the doctors are always trying to involve you and trying to take time out to teach whenever they can. Placements are genuinely really enjoyable and you learn so much from them!
How do you make your medical CV competitive?
Ohh... not the best person again, my CV hasn't massively expanded since I started medical school. I think if you know for sure what you want to do in the future you can easily engage in events, attend extra lectures via societies, go to conferences relevant to your desired speciality. At the moment I'm not 100% sure so I've just engaged in whatever interests me so any additional things I've done are from all sorts of different areas and not focussed or geared to a specific career path.
Are you going to intercalate? If so, do you have any tips for picking a course? :)
You've caught me in the height of my indecisiveness: can you believe I'm still trying to decide whether to intercalate or not! The deadline is less than 10 days away and after a whole year of going to and fro I'm still sitting on the fence about whether I should put an application in... 😐
It's really helpful if you can choose an intercalation course based on what you want to do in the future as that way it's directly relevant. However, in terms of giving you points when applying for foundation programmes, the subject content doesn't matter at all. The main thing you should use to choose a course is simply the one you think you'll enjoy and find the most interesting! You don't want to take a year out of Medicine to find yourself bored and your intercalated degree will have high expectations to live up to meet the engagement that Medicine does. Go with your gut and what genuinely intrigues you over anything else. Speak to students who've done the courses to get an idea of how they teach, modules they cover etc.
How did you decide that you wanted to start an Instagram blog?
I started my blog before I applied for medicine as a way to keep track and encourage myself to reflect regularly on my experiences. Over the years the content on my blog has evolved a fair bit and gone from just being based around my reflections to including advice/tips posts. It was in the first year of med school that I decided to open an associated instagram account because I wanted to share more of the smaller day-to-day experiences of going through medical school, little things that I couldn't really write a whole blog post about...and so the instagram was born! 😆
Are there any opportunities to get involved in research projects and getting them published outside of the course modules/assignments? If so, how would you go about doing it?
Beyond PEP (the research strand as part of Manchester's course) I haven't done any other independent research, so I can't advise much on this I'm afraid.
The 3rd year PEP is quite a significant research project and one that a lot of people do submit for publication, but unfortunately our one had to be cancelled due to Covid.
Intercalation also brings up another opportunity to do research and get published - so that's another option.
What's your favourite article on Scrubbed Up?
Has to be the 8 Worst People You Could Be In PBL post - written so well and each category brings a stream of people to mind (myself included 👀). Great article! 😂
How are you coping with productivity and lockdown?
I've actually not been that productive in lockdown, I've been enjoying some downtime and am taking each day as it comes rather than bombarding myself with strict timetables and huge lists of things to do. I'm trying to be a little bit more productive and make sure I'm keeping up with some Medicine by slowly working through some online cases we've been given. I've also weirdly found I'm a lot more productive after 4am, so if there's anything I really need to do I've been using the time between 4-7am to do it and then going to bed after that.
I know...I'm living with an insane sleeping schedule right now, but seeing as there's no need to actually wake up early in the mornings each day it's working for me to sleep right through the mornings and wake up mid-afternoon.
I'm also trying to use my planner to create a bit more structure to the day: I usually find it helps to block off time to focus on certain things so am attempting some more of that. However, I'm having a much more flexible approach to it, I know if I try and force myself to do too much nothing will get done.