TSR Med Students' Society Part III

Good luck with that! Patrick's pituitary is the best of those.

3rd year has been a blast so far, so, so much better than pre-clins but a lot harder work. Been in chichester on a gastro firm, really nice team there and let me get really stuck in. Christmas break is welcome, made extra great by having 0 work to do for once! Heading to Woolwich for neuro/ophth/psych after Christmas, the commute will be annoying but should be interesting (probably not a patch on gastro though).

They do an average of your past years academics. I just don't understand their logic of writing off the OSCE/Spotter exams despite banging on about how important they are and then putting paper A (which is universally known as a waste of time) on equal footing with our end of year exams. It's ludicrously stupid.

There's no chance in hell I'd be able to intercalate externally, I was doubtful I'd be able to with a ranking in the 5th decile, nevermind the 9th.

I was thinking of doing Med-Ed or infection/immunology. I have an SSC in Feb for Med-Ed so was going to see how interesting it was. Spoke to MedicineMan for a bit and I was put off slightly though.

From what I've heard from MedicineMan and other people who are on the MedEd course, it's pretty intense! Seems like they're constantly getting essays and they have an exam this week which apparently a majority of people fail But then again MedicineMan only talks to me when he wants to complain about his BSc

I'm not sure how difficult infection and immunity is though.

blah

That sounds really good It makes me even more excited for when I get to clinicals (hopefully!) Did you request for your first rotation to be outside of London or was it just pot luck?

You weren't out ragging on Crash Course? You disappoint me! I jest. Like FFC said, you still have the whole of RAG week to look forward to...and we specifically chose a good set of days to suit both first and second years, so there shouldn't be any excuses there!

How have you enjoyed your first term so far though?

Also grats to you (and all the other BL freshers on here) for passing FunMed...it's always a tough one and tbh it is one of my lowest scoring ICAs to date. It certainly gets much much better, as you probably know by now.

Ok so basically, they've messed up ranking this year? I was always under the impression it was A, B, C, D (and E) for distinctions/merits and B, C, D (and E) for actual ranking. Hmmm. Its all weird now.

And yeah, as far as I am aware, last year it was a ratio of 2:1 in favour of your ranking if you wanted to intercalate too. The year before us was 3:1. But like FFC said, just interview well and you're ok.

Also re Med Ed - you guys really get me at the wrong time. It's not that bad. These last 2 weeks were mental though with like 4 essays all due last Friday totalling something ridiculous like 10,000/11,000 words, and we had a stupid stats exam to revise for the day before the essay deadlines too. That didn't stop me from going out with FFC for Nandos the day before my exam and the day before the essay deadlines with some others. Priorities and all that.

Oh, and if that doesn't suck enough, we have yet another exam on the first day back after Christmas (3rd Jan) which basically means my holidays are kinda messed up. Buuuuuttttt other than that, we get to start proper teaching next term as opposed to the random teaching sessions they've thrown in this term - starting with a first year Metabolism pbl facilitation second week back I think, then we have clinical skills teaching with year ones, then learning landscape teaching with years 1/2, then some teaching observations, then some more 3rd year comm skills facilitation etc. Looking good!!

Come to the BSc fair (whenever that is in Jan) and you can get other students opinions on the course so far as opposed to just mine. If its any time after 3rd Jan (which I suspect it probably would be), we generally should be a lot happier!

All this talk of iBSc's is making me wonder, am I a complete muppet for avoiding doing one? Just have zero desire to do it.

Worst year of my life

That's what I needed to hear

Depends whether you're a book fanboy like some of the younger years here though?

The only days where I felt fed up on my last placement were when I was stuck in doing essays/presentations, I missed being on the wards. So probably not!

It looks like they've corrected it now. A/B/C/D/E are what calculates our deciles and are what's used for awarding merits. Our actual deciles will be different though as for FY1 they don't include SSCs or ICAs so A/E aren't included like we were originally told.

Our intercalation rank is the one that's messed up. It only takes into account A&B. Why they didn't do it the same way as our deciles I have no idea.

I'm still going to apply for Med/Ed this year and possibly infection/immunology then if I don't get anywhere I'll apply again next year (which seems likely). The iBSc lecture/fair is on the 27th.

The BSc was probably the only thing about Imperial putting me off. If Imperial didn't require a pass to go to year 5, I might have just taken a mid-MBBS gap year. lol (not really)

It doesn't sound like you'd want to do one either.

I just can't see myself enjoying it at all, plus I'd be frustrated about graduating a year later.

Only thinking about it now as my clinical advisor was trying to convince me it was a good idea the other day.

I've not been told how to search for information from journals and the like yet but I'm just trying to find out if the fact that mothers who themselves were premature are more likely to give birth prematurely themselves is true or not? Are there any textbooks that this kind of thing would likely be discussed in? The articles I've found seem to suggest that it is true but I don't want to just be picking random papers from Scholar that agree with me while somehow ignoring those that don't...

I've not been told how to search for information from journals and the like yet but I'm just trying to find out if the fact that mothers who themselves were premature are more likely to give birth prematurely themselves is true or not? Are there any textbooks that this kind of thing would likely be discussed in? The articles I've found seem to suggest that it is true but I don't want to just be picking random papers from Scholar that agree with me while somehow ignoring those that don't...