Oxford Medical Students Answer Your Questions

you sum up your medical school experience in three words exciting demanding tiring roller coaster variable unexpected challenging stressful Marathon not Sprint hey guys welcome back to another video from the aspiring medics in today's video we've interviewed different Oxford medical students on their experience at Oxford University it's shrouded by so many myths but in today's video we're going to be focusing on myth busting so if you guys enjoy it don't forget to like comment and subscribe enjoy I'm Yusuf I'm a fifth year medical student and I'm at Green Templeton college so I'm Alex I'm a fifth year medical student and I'm at St Edmund hall or known as Teddy Hall my name is Oscar I'm a final year medic I joined four years ago as part of The Graduate entry course I'm at Somerville my name is Aisha I'm a sexy spent my first three years at Jesus college so I am Rory I'm one of the sixth year Medics just finished finals yeah so I'm at Telly Hall where we're filming today and I've been there throughout the duration of medical school what's your favorite set um probably a heart cell it's probably got to be a fibroblast I think tricky question either a neuron or I'm going to be indecisely can say cardiac myocyte as well a peripheral neuron an osteoclast I think the advice I'd say is know what works for you and make your own path especially when it comes down to studying find out actually what works for you and trying to be as proactive as possible but at the same time work with others because we're all in this together really I think it would probably be to relax and remember that medicine is much more of a like a marathon of learning than a Sprint because I think when you come into Oxford particularly because a lot of the three-year degrees have a really intense environment it's very easy to get caught up in that and think okay I'm going to work day to day really intensely and not remember that you need to give yourself um time and sort of space to learn over a long period instead so I think that'll be my main piece of advice definitely work a bit harder in your first year for the graduate entry course the first year is very intense it's a lot of physiology and I came from a psychology background so I perhaps didn't have all the language that some of the people who had had more biologically related degrees I didn't have the same language they had so as I felt like I was doing catch up so I think first year if I worked a bit harder I'd feel a lot more competent in the second half of the course just slow down take a deep breath and like everything's going to be fine you just need to take it slow and calm down just because you feel like you're behind doesn't mean that you actually are behind and just because you feel like there's too much information and there's not enough time to learn it all doesn't mean that that's actually the case usually it's quite quite easy to get yourself in a situation where you're feeling like what you feel is consuming you and I think if you just speak to the people around you you'll find everybody's um in the same boat and if you just like it'll help you feel less isolated I think probably just look around you and as much as your own style of learning is important the people here are also very clever and kind of work out the best ways of doing things so look around you see what other people are doing and and just give it a go so I think in particular pre-clinical I should have made more of essay plans and um make the most out of clinical placement and get to know the nurses and make friends with them because they know a lot and they'll be really good in teaching you practical skills especially like blood taking for example so if you get to know them they'll tell you where the interesting patients are so make friends and patience and nurses think you have to be quite introspective with clinical medicine probably more so than than pre-clinical medicine you have to have a real sense of awareness and also you have to be really receptive to feedback um because I think quite a lot of people think they're practicing in a way that's good and then someone might perhaps um point out to them that that they need to readjust slightly and you have to be quite on board with taking on that feedback but at the same time you have to be quite resilient because you're always sort of in smaller groups on Wards maybe even one-to-one with doctors and that means that it can be quite intense kind of learning it's quite different to the sort of big lectures and tutorials that we have in the first few years so definitely sort of taking on everyone's feedback and and listening to it carefully but also having that resilience to keep pushing through every day and learning new things so yes you can slow down at first don't push yourself too fast too quickly it could be quite nerve-wracking especially with the procedural skills lots of the students don't get their first phlebotomy on natural patients until later on and whether you want to do that earlier or later it's up to you but um don't feel you need to rush it if you don't feel ready to practice the skills the clinical skills lab is always open and the people who work there are always happy to help you just let them know that you're coming in and check with them I think I really struggled initially going into fourth year because you go from a really structured environment in pre-clinical where you've got lots of lectures and tutorials and labs and you've got this massive timetable that's full of stuff to suddenly being in charge of your own learning a lot more and having a lot more autonomy over your time um and so I think that the advice I'd like to give myself is to have a goal for every single day and they don't need to be like big goals but if I'm going into placement like today I want to practice doing the cardiovascular exam and I want someone to watch me and give me feedback on that and that's like what I want to get out of today and I think that's really helpful for yourself but also helpful for the clinical team around you because if you meet like doctors or consultants if you're in a clinic or you're on the ward and you tell them that this is what I'd like to do today it also helps them to find them opportunities for you and it just means that you get more out of your day rather than just going in and see what the Day brings I actually always loved the wardroens and some people just find them a bit boring is very dependent on who you get um who you get to teach you on the Wardrobe runs but um I think make the most of the world Vines and anything you can do on top of that is a bonus um but just getting comfortable with being on the wards is like we've just done our finals and they're very similar to the 40 exams um but the difference between my fourth year Oscars and which are the um kind of practical exams where we sit with actors um the difference between what I did in fourth year and sixth year basically just boils down to confidence and that's just about being on Awards having said that if if it's rubbish on the woods then just leave like there's always more important things to do how are you feeling and and what was that experience like coming to University yeah it I was very nervous about what Oxford would be like um and so I think I was quite scared that like coming to a college which at the time was sort of a higher percentage of private school students and um also coming from Southwest and kind of knowing that quite a lot of people in Oxford come from London or sort of that area I was a bit nervous that I wouldn't find people that I got on with um or was sort of my type of person but very quickly actually found that that's completely not the case and my cohort here um at Teddy of Medics we're all very supportive I think most of us went to state school and we all helped each other through all the learning so that was very quickly sort of gone but that was definitely how I was feeling on the first day um and I think yeah I would probably say it's it's not how it's stereotyped to be um and I know that's a lot of people's fear as well so yeah it's um quite nerve-wracking uh coming into a new group of people for the first time we have the lovely Deborah hay teaching us hematology in our first lecture and that really set the tone for the next four years really um I found it quite difficult because I was moving away from home moving quite far so my um family at like 200 miles away and I think the biggest thing that I noticed when I first moved to Oxford was everybody had a very different accent to mine and it was picked up in pretty much any conversation that I had with anyone and it's something that became quite self-conscious about but then as I spent more time here I just realized that it's part of what makes me who I am it makes me different to other people and that's absolutely fine so nervous uh like I remember unpacking my room with my mum and she was putting stuff everywhere and I didn't know where she's putting stuff and I was getting so agitated and like just nervous I didn't know anyone here I didn't know anyone at Oxford or um but as I began to meet people and saw familiar faces from our like big group chat that we'd be messaging on for a while like everything just kind of slowly fell into place it took a while but it will fall into place for any first year starting I think excited um I can't remember what the first lecture actually was but through the first weeks of it were hard there was a lot of work but it felt like a natural progression from a level so nothing felt too kind of curveball it was just a lot of work um but as I say you just get used to it and everyone is in the same boat just talk to you talk to friends is what I'd say because as if you're feeling stressed then the easiest thing that's ever calmed my nerves is just to talk to other people because you actually realize that everyone is stressed and everyone is kind of feeling that they're treading water just to keep the last question and how did you celebrate after finishing the first year exams and trash me and then um we had a big night out and then my parents came really early the next morning which was horrendous because I was really hungover but it felt so good just to drive out into the countryside back home see my cat see my dog can you explain what a trashing is yeah so trashing happens after after most of your exams depending on where they are couldn't get trashed in these last exams we had because they were at the hospital but what usually happens is you get sprayed with sprayed with Prosecco usually the cheapest Prosecco you can find um confetti gets thrown on you silly string anything basically to make you look as just like a massive pinata um powerlifting I'd say so um training at ifley gym at Sports Center really really helps four times a week it's really good obviously it's social and also because you can just let off some steam really covid would have would have saw point because it hit me in my second year just before I was due to set exams so it was a very difficult time to have a lot of uncertainty because we didn't know if we were sitting our exams we didn't know what format they'd be in and we were all just sort of sent home and had to wait for information so I think that was possibly the most stressful part but also in some ways it brought a lot of meaning to the studying that we were doing because you know studying medicine during a pandemic you feel like you're actually contributing and sort of helping with what's going on in some small way um so in some ways it was also strangely motivating but it was definitely a very difficult time to deal with a lot of uncertainty and then coming back to University and doing the third year research project during that time as well um it was very hard to adjust to sort of new schedules and social distancing and not being able to see everyone you wanted to see so that was quite difficult to cope with I picked up a lot of sport over those two years and I think that was definitely good um sort of way to release the stress that was going on over those years as well but yeah definitely staying connected to why I was studying medicine as well and sort of keeping that meaning behind it was useful yeah tell us a bit about this um so I've been rowing for the last two and a half years um which has been absolutely fantastic I started with Teddy Hall in my third year um during the pandemic and it was it's very socially distant and it's outside so it was one of the only things we were able to do that was sort of Social and fun and keeping fit and stuff like over that period so it's a really nice thing to do then and then I swapped to Osler house which is the med Expo Club in my fourth year when I started clinical school and I'm now the president of that so I'm keeping it going we've just had a race today as well so it's been been really good fun to row with Medics and keep up with people and sort of de-stress together from the same course so yeah so if I have a stressful situation I can turn to my friends if something's gone on but taking a break taking a day off clinical practice if I'm feeling really stressed so I can catch up on life admin uh any learning which I want to do or even just go out and enjoy Oxford because it's such a lovely place the thing I've learned through the years is how to cope with the stress and so when I used to get stressed out because I had too much to do or wasn't getting enough done I used to try and work harder in longer hours and that meant like having a really chaotic sleeping schedule and like missing out on doing nice things or canceling plans and as I've gone older I've realized that actually that used to make me less productive um and so now when things get stressful I'll just try and take the day off or take some time off at least and do some exercise or go for a walk like speak to friends go and visit some friends visit family and that normally like helps me reset and then realize put things into perspective yeah so I've definitely had many many stressful points I think um so I come from mid Wales and to begin with it felt like it was just a million miles away and I was very homesick but actually just going home or getting friends from home or family to come up and realizing that that distance is way shorter than I thought helped a lot um and then having an extracurricular so I sing and was in an acapella group for most of uni so that was basically the reason that I enjoyed these last six years as much as I did it's definitely from fourth year Beyond especially clinical placement because I feel like you get this massive payoff you've learned all the science but all of a sudden now you can apply it to patients history taking it's such a good feeling and like being a detective sort of figuring out what's going on and you sort of feel part of a team in hospital and that's probably the closest I felt to sort of being a doctor because you can actually make a difference in terms of patient care I think probably the first time I was doing a can dealer in the patient I was up at the Horton Hospital in Banbury um and I was feeling quite anxious and I was very much hoping that it was me and another grad medic and I was very much hoping that I wasn't going to be watched but the nurse came along and was staring at me I was absolutely terrified shaking which is not good when you're wielding a candidate but I took a deep breath relaxed myself found the vein and it all went pretty smoothly All Things Considered and it was just a really nice way to to sort of start clinical clinical life in fourth year that's a memory of medical school so far it was quite recent so we had to redo our fifth year exams and it meant that we were all quarantined and we were held in these rooms and so we'd finished our exams um and we finished all of our Oscars which are like practical exams and we were held in the lecture theater for like three hours and it meant we couldn't use our phones or laptops and so everybody had bought in like um card games and board games and we ended up playing like Monopoly and we played um articulate for about four hours and it was just so much fun and I think yeah it was like seeing everybody in a different light because everybody was so chilled out and so relieved and relaxed and we were able to enjoy that time together I I love the medicine side of things the Psychiatry placements I want to be a psychiatrist so the Psychiatry placements were honestly just I'd waiting to I'd waited all the way until fifth year to do them and I was so nervous I wouldn't enjoy them um but they were just like the best so if there's something you're interested in um then just make the most of that placement when you come to do it because um quite often you'll find that it's it's better than you ever expected but in terms of what I actually enjoyed the most during medical school it would definitely be the extracurricular side of things so just like singing and having that place to escape all of the stress that you're just kind of under all the time is is crucial I think can you tell me some of the factors which make coming to a university like Oxford worth it for you um yeah I think one of the best things about Oxford is um the variety of academic opportunities I've definitely been very privileged to meet the supervisors for my Depot here and in general I think the university is incredibly supportive of people doing sort of academic things outside of just the course um which is definitely not the case at other medical schools necessarily they're very encouraging of us to do like research around things or sort of even opportunities within the course to like write a short case report for a patient and then maybe get it published there's lots of kind of things in in the course that allow you to delve a bit deeper into the academics behind medicine and then in general I think Oxford has a really unique social structure because of the colleges and that's one of the things I really like about it as well as these kind of like smaller institutions within the university that means you're quite well supported on a welfare front because you've got College support you've also got Medical School support you've also got um sort of University sports so there's like three different options there but it also means there are so many more clubs and societies that are accessible to people so with rowing like I'd never be able to row for a University team I'm not good enough but here I've been able to pick it up and learn it really quickly and that wouldn't necessarily be the case somewhere else so it's been really exciting to get the chance to do that as well how did you find if you find that free time coming through um it definitely is a step up I'd say I think it's weird because you go from like essay writing very academic to all of a sudden you've got patients in front of you you'll think of differentials but I think if you can just get a red style that can take you on their wing and if you're always asking why and you're trying to understand the thought process it becomes a lot easier just to have that mindset especially when it comes down to Diagnostics also the big change from focusing on depth of knowledge in one field to a massive sort of broad range of knowledge across the whole of clinical medicine is really hard and you sort of come out of of the year of focusing on your own scientific interests and have to convert back to sort of learning everything um which can be quite difficult sort of change of focus but overall I think it's been really nice to to come to clinical school and actually put everything that I did before together um develop more of a clinical interest in science and like learn the skills I'm actually going to use as a doctor it's been really exciting so yeah so that was quite interesting um we'd already had in our first year on Wednesdays we go we spend one week in a GP practice and then one week in a hospital so I'd had some clinical experience which was quite nice going into the fourth year but that when it um kicks off properly it was a big change having a lot less lectures and a lot less formal teaching and having to go out to find those teaching opportunities myself on the wards um so that was a bit of a culture shock but I quite enjoyed doing the practical skills so getting to practice Bloods cannulas things like that was quite a nice change yeah I'm not really sure what expectations I had because we moved to clinical school during the pandemic and so actually being able to go on towards was a lot what met my expectations or exceeded them because there was a time where we weren't being allowed to do that at all I think what surprised me was I guess how easy it is for medical students to blend into the background and be forgotten about um and that kind of is a skill that you learn it learn like as you become more experiences how to make sure that you're getting something out of being there and just reminding the people in the team that you're actually there and you're there to learn something or you're there to help and you're able to do that so to get them to let you so tell me a little bit first day on the wards um I think first day in the wards is definitely a cult shot because you're like whoa what's going on here you're seeing all these different patients probably conditions that you probably haven't come across before and you're there with a consultant and a registrar in like this team and you're trying to sort of guess what's going on you're seeing this is like squiggles on an ECG and then like black and white stuff on the next race you're like I don't know what's going on at first um so you're sort of bewildered um but I think then when you can start to understand a bit what's going on you sort of recognize something and you can go back home be like oh okay so that's what's going on there oh yeah I did do a bit of that pre-clinical that's quite nice because you can start to connect the dots and that means when you see something similar you can pattern recognize and I think that's definitely been the case with like loads of classical conditions I don't know like Graves disease for example I always remember my first patient that I saw from it so when you got those quite classical signs you see it from a textbook and then you see it in real life it's kind of weird because it's like whoa It's almost like it's so weird to seeing that for the first time but I think that really helps to sort of connect the dots and my first placement was in the gym p um which I really enjoyed it's a nice sort of lead up to the hospital medicine and I just specifically remember not realizing the level of responsibility I'd get or like the fact that from the first day I'd be asked to see patients and then report back to doctors by myself um but then I remember seeing a patient with a condition I actually worked on um during my FHS year um and talking to her about it and being able to ask her really focused questions and kind of bring forward a treatment plan based on that and that was actually really really rewarding to to see someone with something I'd researched and sort of thought about a lot and then be able to present it to a doctor saying I've asked these Focus questions I know what this patient needs it was a really rewarding first day and you don't always know throughout medical school what you know what to ask or what someone has so I definitely got lucky in that moment there are also moments where you go and talk to patients and you've got no idea what's going on and that's perfectly normal as well but that was a really exciting sort of first day of of speaking to people and really realizing this is real and I'm going to have an impact so did you struggle at all when you first met patients and approaching them knowing how to do that um I think it was fine to talk to them at first from like a personal level just to find out how everything is um but I think speaking to a patient just to find out more about like their experiences or like how they're finding stuff it's quite different to potentially taking a history and being quite focused and analytical about it um so I think talking to patients was something that I had already done before anyways but I think trying to know what questions to ask and how to like how doctors can basically play chess when they're like having a conversation and how yes they're trying to build a rapport but they're also asking really good questions to then narrow down like what conditions going on and really being quite focused on that so I think after a while you kind of learn better to do that and you're not just asking questions for the sake of it but you're asking questions in response to something particular that a patient said so I think that mindset and being able to sort of go into that detective mode is something that takes a little while to do and I'm still learning how to do um I think there's so much because it's quite um a privilege right being able to speak to patients and even in being a medical student they you know that they put a lot of trust in you and let me say it can be quite open and honest about like their experiences of stuff and also for many if they're finding it quite difficult to have you know an appointment with the doctor or something it's actually really good sort of like therapeutic almost for them just to be able to let something off their chest um one of the times I imagine um from a e was someone that had like really really high heart rate they had atrial fibrillation 180 beats per minute uh they're going to shock and then the doctor defibrillated so they use their shock and it was literally that like an electric shock and then it went back to 80 beats per minute blood pressure was absolutely fine so it was something like out the movie so seeing those times like wow actually that's incredible to see and another case was like in Ops and gyne when um I had a patient that came in because they were going to labum this was like at 10 A.M and then we were able to see that whole thing progress and then a nurse took me under their wing and they taught me like how I can help in assisting a birth and that was honestly magical to help with that to see like it goes from like no life to all of a sudden having a baby born and literally being the first one to hold this baby and there's looking you the eyes like that and they start crying and they're right okay off to mum so you get those really cool magical moments I think from both cases where it's like life or death and that it gives you a perspective I'd say how have you dealt with that um yeah I think there's those that come to mind so whether it be the fact that a patient felt like dismissed especially with their condition or a child maybe having a heart condition that wasn't taken seriously by the school for example or maybe it's just the fact that someone's really and you can understand why annoyed about the waiting times in a e for example but I think in all those circumstances it's just about actually having a conversation with them and remembering that they're a patient they're a person they're not just a disease and actually they probably have you know there's a reason for why they're feeling a certain way I think if you approach it in the right way and you know you try and do the best for them that always works I think just treating someone as a patient and as a person just works favorite place to study definitely is the bottling Library I think that's my go-to it's nice and Central it's quite oxfordy it's got quite a classical vibe to it um it's usually fairly quiet-ish most of the time you can get a good spot upstairs and that's why I always go to um College library of course of the convenience I think GCC as well they've got free coffee machine um so there's nothing left going to can't go wrong definitely the Teddy Hall Library it's quite unique and it's um it's in an old church as well which means it's really beautiful I also quite like the hospital Library that's quite a nice one to pop to if you're in um placement as well and then all sorts of cafes and places as well and probably Peloton is my favorite Cafe to work in I mainly study at home I have to be honest but when I when I do study I quite like going to the RAD Camp I'm not sure if it's just because I like the aesthetic appeal of it but being in the center of town as well there's lots of easily accessible coffee shops cafes supermarkets so easy to get food and take breaks when you're in in town in the center I'd say the missing Bean but where I live out in Carolina quite like uh Flows In the Park that's a nice cafe I've always studied in libraries um quite liked well the Jesus Library just because it was convenient and before it got knocked down I used to study at the Radcliffe science Library well in pre-clinical I studied in a library once and that was just between lectures and in clinical I went a few times towards the end of finals um basically just because I loved well I just felt most comfortable um working in my room so I think working in cafes I've also done a few times and that can be nice and that can be fun but I just love being in my own space and just being able to get a cup of tea and like procrastinate as much as I want and I'm I'm the kind of worker that just does it all day but procrastinates loads so find whatever works and just just be comfortable with that really so in terms of just value for money I like prep is always just the go-to there's a subscription which most people have I swear um and yeah that's kind of the go-to for a quick coffee but there's um Art Cafe which is where I always take my family it's more expensive but if your family come up then they can pay um and art cafes just by Westgate is really nice it's usually quite busy but um yeah that's where I like to go I think it's probably believe in yourself and know that actually you know what there's certain things that you should worry about that actually you can change but then there are other things that you shouldn't be worried about so I think trust in the process of things and always just reach out um you know to friends or older years if you need any help because everyone's gone through the process and you're never the only one going through it I think I would have spent a lot less time studying and a lot more time like trying new things and keeping up with the hobbies that I started like in first term but then gradually kind of dropped through the year as I got more busy and I think I would prioritize like keeping up with playing a sport or keeping up with like doing a hobby rather than like stopping doing them to spend more time studying or to try and catch up on essays or catch up on work so you said that one of the ways how do you find balancing your time between medicine and other things yeah um I think balance is something that we're all like aspiring to have and it's always something that changes right because you've got always changing demands for all those different dimensions of your life they'll be social University competition wise in terms of a sport um I think for me Google Calendar my friends will tell you but I live my whole life on Google Calendar and I like it for me because usually I'm quite spontaneous and if I don't have a Google Calendar I'm just everywhere and I won't get anything done but a Google Calendars gives me like regimen so I color code it and that allows me to just manage different stuff and be like okay from 8pm onwards each weekday that's my cut off eight till ten that's gonna I'm gonna be at the gym and that works for me so I think it's quite useful and it means that I'm able to do well academically not in spite of doing sports but actually because of it because it actually gives you quite a nice stress relief and A coping mechanism especially when you know things can get quite busy with a e or whatever it might be or whatever placement it just gives you an opportunity to forget all about that just because you're going through the motions you're enjoying yourself with friends and when lifting and they're cheering you on with your weights that you don't think you can lift but then you're able to do it so I think it's those little marginal gains that really add up and uh do you find friends at one of their primary sources of support yeah definitely um I think medicine can definitely be quite demanding at times um and especially in terms of workload difficulty and everything else friends absolutely not only medic friends but also non-medic friends obviously that this gets a lot harder in clinicals because most people start to graduate then so you're really left with your Medics but I'm quite lucky that I've got like such a good medic cohort both in terms of housemates and that can be really good just to go to libraries together get lunch and also like games nights that we just do in the house so whatever works for you um that can be really useful so I know you said that you did a research project and third you know just for any first years it might be watching this can you just tell us a little bit about what third year is and and what it involves yeah um so third year sometimes known as the FHS year I think which stands for final honor schools it's like a separate degree so you're studying for a bachelor of the Arts in medical Sciences instead and within that there's like separate sections so you do a couple of modules I think there's like metabolism Endocrinology pharmacology various different types of Neuroscience um Immunology pretty much anything you could want to study and then you also write an essay on a topic that you're really interested in and you do a research project which for most people is in the lab kind of working with cells or sometimes working with patients for some people they do like a database project or coding or something like that and there's a chance to go to other universities as well which is really cool some of my friends went to Imperial College and did theirs there which is really exciting so that whole year is kind of focused on research and learning to do medical research and sort of develop your own scientific interests so yeah did you want me to talk about my specific project as well okay so I was doing drug Discovery research and working in drug repurposing in the department of pharmacology and that was really good fun I got to try and work out whether we could repurpose an old drug for a very rare genetic condition which is a very sort of up-and-coming field of research it's it's very it's not as financially desirable to discover drugs for rare conditions because there's not as many patients who take them so it's quite rewarding to work in a field where you know like not sort of uh so sorry it's quite rewarding to work in a field where big Pharma um isn't focusing their sort of efforts and kind of make those new discoveries yourself as well which is very exciting so yeah yeah so tell me a bit about your PhD and the opportunities that are available yeah um so my PhD is in plastic surgery I'm working with a really fantastic group looking at carpal tunnel syndrome hoping to maybe cure it with a drug instead of surgery um so the medical school has been really fantastic and accommodating of this and I'm on a specific program called the oxcam program which is aimed at Oxford medical students and allows them to take time out to do research on something that they might want to look at deeper from their clinical school or from their research here so it's really exciting tell me about graduate medicine and how starting was different to when you started going to graduate degree so obviously I'm a lot older a lot older um so I didn't have the same expectations of things like freshers week and starting a new course um and going out and partying necessarily I don't know whether the undergrads had that experience but um I think it was a lot calmer in many ways having having done a degree beforehand coming in and being able to take that experience within psychology because I could apply the skills I'd learned though even if not necessarily all the information wasn't useful until say our late years where we did more psychiatric medicine I could still apply my knowledge of scientific method evidence-based medicine things like that which helped a little bit um and also just having a bit of extra confidence in my own academic abilities I think also helped I don't know if undergrads found that so being able to structure a day well is important taking regular breaks I think helps my sort of brain to decompress and assimilate the knowledge I've taken in so I'll take breaks every 20 minutes or something like that if I'm studying at home not long ones just a couple of minutes um but having having the discipline to follow that that's that's the real skill you need to develop and uh I've had my ups and downs following my own rules over the four years but overall so far it's done me well how did you find it integrating with the undergraduate medical school it's been really lovely I mean they're all lovely I haven't had a chance to meet half them as much as I'd like because covid got in the way of quite a lot of our integration in fourth year with lab Nets and we were all online so I know lots of names but not necessarily all the faces to go with them but um meeting people on our rotation's been really lovely uh they're probably cleverer than I am they know a lot more than I do um yeah I really don't know what to say for that one how did you find that um you like to study in your first three years I think how I studied in my first three years is definitely very different to how I study now um but I have found that I could concentrate then for long periods of time I used to usually work in the library because I used to like to separate like my living space from my working space and I'd usually work in the library with other people and so that meant that when we had breaks we could all go and get like a coffee together or just sit and watch some TV in the GCR for a bit and it just made studying which is quite like an isolating experience because there's no getting away from writing your own essay or having to do your work yourself just made it a little bit of a nicer experience is there anything you wish you'd known about the setup of the course when you started in first year um so I had no idea that um the degree in third year the FHS year is like a standalone year so I thought that the first second and third year all counted towards that and I also thought that the third year was passed and failed I didn't realize like it's a an actual like graded degree I'm not sure how much it would have changed what I did but it's just kind of useful to have that information from the beginning so you know what you're getting yourself into is there anything you change about how you approached your clinical years I don't really think there's anything that I change I think every mistake was a learning experience and it's all worked out well so far fingers crossed we've not got Finals results yet but um I think I've learned from the mistakes I made so I wouldn't go back and change them so you said you made mistakes and that they were learning experiences what were those mistakes so that other people can learn more without making those mistakes yeah I think what would have saved me a lot of time and heartache I guess was um turning up to placements and expecting people to first of all know that I'm meant to be there and second of all um help me achieve what I wanted to do and I think you really realize that the onus to learn anything is on you and people are willing to help so long as you tell them what you'd like help with and take Direction and they're happy to take direction from you so I think go in with a plan because just turning up and then expecting to learn things can be quite chaotic and just a massive I think it's a I don't want to say a waste of time but it is a waste of your time because you can get things done a lot faster if you say this is what I need to do and this is how I can achieve them will you help me do that um yes I guess to summarize that it'd be be more direct in knowing what you want and then don't be afraid to ask for it all right guys we hope you've enjoyed that video if you have don't forget to leave a like and also comment below on the next video that you'd like to see from us alright guys see you in the next one thank you

Channel: Aspiring Medics

Views: 3,557

Keywords: Get into Medicine, Medicine Personal Statement, Medicine Personal Statement Oxford, Medicine Personal Statement Cambridge, Medicine Personal Statement Analysis, Medicine Interview, Medicine Medical Ethics, Medicine Current Afairs, Medicine Interviews

Id: 0nZqTcTTi9k

Length: 40min 54sec (2454 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 02 2023