Anyone studying at Liverpool? How is it going?

I think how are you finding it is quite broad. I'm a second year, I like some things, don't like other things, right now it's exam season not thriving aha so probably not best time to ask. I'm happy to answer any specific questions. I have a GYG blog for this year too if that offers any insight.

Cons, we get barely any live animal handling, especially compared to the likes of Nottingham. We have 3 day sessions in first year and then a couple sessions in second. We still have a lot of practicals, we have clinical skills weekly (self-guided) and a lot of prosections, some dissections and some other things like at least 1 a week generally, but not live animals. I find this can be a bit of a damper on motivation (although I horse ride with the uni so I get horsey fixes most weeks and this year I've brought pet rats so that helped quite a bit) and I feel it would be beneficial to some students who may have not had a broad work experience range etc. But it isn't like, awful, it doesn't seem to have affected the opinions of people on placements etc and obviously we still have to do EMS placements so you do handle animals there. I think our EMS placement rules are now a bit too lax too, other unis demand like x number of animals per placement etc whereas Liverpool doesn't so you get a lot of people doing all their placements at 1 place with like 3 ducks and saying that's their poultry done - but as you arrange your placements it wouldn't impact you. I think that's the main 'negative' of Liverpool though, a lot of other things are more subjective.

Pros, we start clinical skills that are very useful for actual practice from first year. The staff are very supportive imo, obviously some lecturers will be better than others (and is subjective anyway) everywhere but I do think most of the time the teaching and resources with notes etc are very good. You'll know about the city, costs and uni life already which imo is great. I personally like having a hospital for rotations as I think staff will be very used to having students etc but I don't think a uni not having one is a con either - preference I guess and don't think it has a big impact in the long run.

We have a spiral curriculum which I really like except during exam time. So for Normal Structure and Function which is our 'biology' subject with anatomy/physiology and later a lot of pharmacology there is a 6 week intro block and then you move onto fortnights for each body system (with relevant practicals etc), and every year you do that again in more detail. So first year is getting to know anatomy and physiology, second year we've added on pharmacology and some more comparative anatomy for some fortnights etc. Other subjects work slightly differently but same concept that you are always building on the knowledge, I personally really like this as at the end of year 1 you're not left with half a body and I think it's nice to see how your knowledge expands (I quite hate studying anatomy but I've been surprised at how much I've remembered now during exam time even if it's not something I went over loads recently) and I think it's just a good way to learn for me long term. But again, subjective, others will prefer a modular curriculum. My con with spiral is that in exams you can't really 'prepare' for a certain exam - in any exam, any subject can come up, and not just from that year like we get tested on a lot of year 1 content in second year. So that is just a bit tougher imo as that is a big volume to remember, whereas modular unis usually have tests on subjects I think, so say you do your modular exam on parasitology you can cram that before the exam and then 'forget' (obviously not actually) it after so maybe it's a bit easier to prep for - but usually they have more exams and I think exams that actually count earlier in the year, whereas we have 4 exams every year with mocks in Jan that don't count for anything and the actual ones now.

Let me know if you want to know about anything else @OrangeArcher if you have any of your own opinions to add?