biomedical science 1st year tips

Does anyone have any general tips for starting a biomed degree?

hi! Third-year biomed student here, I’ll preface this a little with the fact that it may kinda depend on what type of biomed degree you’re doing since generally the Russell Group uni courses have a more research focus and most other unis are IBMS accredited and more focused on being a clinical biomedical scientist. I’m at KCL, and I’m specialising in neuroscience! :smile:

I believe most biomed degrees in y1 introduce you to the range of base topics - mine had what they called a Common Year One which covered physiology, anatomy, chemistry, biochemistry, cell biology with a little neuro, pharmacology, genetics and a bit of skills which was mostly statistics.

Generally in y1, the learning expectation is what they call the Remember and Understand levels of this learning tier thing, which are pretty self-explanatory— in my experience, there’s no additional reading expected other than the textbooks if you need them! And you should get access to most of the textbooks online for free. So on that my biggest piece of advice here is something I didn’t do 😅 but it’s to start early with your revision!! Since it’s mainly about knowing and understanding info at this stage, it will help a lot if you start going over things after class, making your revision notes and then just refreshing yourself maybe once every one or two weeks. (I say this as someone who didn’t start revising for my y1 finals until the week before 😅💀)

Another piece of advice I’d give is to try out for every research opportunity you can find, because research experience is a huge thing for post-grad opportunities and jobs and depending on your field of interest there are lots of things available! (Again, I’m preaching what I didn’t do and here I am with zero actual experience lmao. Tbf I did try a lot last year but with no success)

Generally in y1 they’ll introduce you to some basic practical skills, it’s mostly using micropipettes which are easy once you get the hang of it. Something I learnt in my y1 practicals is that it isn’t a disaster if an experiment goes wrong, it happens in science all the time and the most important thing is to identify why! Some practicals you may have to write reports on (basically what you did and why, and what the results were) and acknowledging sources of any error is something that’s expected in those.

My other tip really would be to get some citation software for the few instances (at least in y1) where you have to reference papers. Oftentimes your uni will have free access to some, I use the RefWorks extension for Microsoft Word, and it is a lifesaver in saving time on writing references.

Finally, don’t be afraid to ask questions!! Even if they might seem silly or a little outside of the lecture scope, most lecturers are really happy to see students engaging and thinking in different ways about the content!

I hope this helps! It’s a little difficult when biomed courses can be so different, so feel free to ask me any other questions you may have :smile: