ULTRA REPLY POST (good luck finding your answers)
Other way around, St lukes is on the edge of town whereas Streatham is a bit further away and up a hill (yeah, sorry). I stayed on Streatham campus in my first year and turned out ok as my time was split half and half between the two campuses.
Either is fine tbh, you have that shuttle bus from near St Lukes (cant give details as I never used it unfortunately)
In answer to three of you, the books i would recommend from the library for 1st year :
1) Alberts
Molecular Biology of the cell was always one I used a lot
2) Sherwood's
Human physiology These are probably the two best ones for first year, will cover most of what you do during it....but I wouldn't recommend buying them, they will set you back around £50 each, and I always found plenty of copies in the library. They also usually have a few in the LSRC (you'll find out what that is really soon).
I can provide links to the books if you are interested, just so you can look them up yourselves if you want (just google what i wrote tbh and you will probably find them
1) Not sure what you mean by "competitive"...if you mean difficult to get in i can't comment as I started three years ago and there are wayyy more students nowadays. if you mean "does everyone want to beat each other in exam marks"....not really, we just want them all over and done with usually (lol)
2) I originally applied for medicine (yeah im one of those losers unfortunately) but I really dont regret choosing the course-allowed me to explore lots of human physiology, I like the city and campuses, really miss the place tbh
. I did have some gripes with the course, but from what I've heard from people currently in final year, they changed a lot of the things I complained about, which sounds pretty good to me
3) We did all sorts....it was split into 5 broad categories each lasting a month:
*Circulation (heart, lungs, blood...)
*Digestion, metabolism and excretion (including digestion, liver, kidneys, drug metabolism....etc etc)
*Immune system (including infection, innate, adaptive
*Cell division and death (including basic dev bio, pregnancy, cancer, aging/death
*Neuroscience AKA the best part of the damn course
You do this cycle in first year (mainly looking at anatomy and how the things work in healthy people) and second year (focusing more on diseases where this stuff starts to malfunction). Final year is a bit different, you look at 10 different diseases for 2 weeks each, going all over the place, but looking at more cutting edge research stuff, including some done by some of the labs right there in Exeter.
You guys let me know if you got any more questions, happy to answer what i can