Pros and cons of your med school?

I'm guessing you mean North-East

anyone got any pros/cons for Birmingham/Liverpool?

erm..Birmingham don't do PBL...

I'll do one for Birmingham (a 5th yr's perspective).


PROS:
- excellent clinical (and post-grad) potential - we have world experts in certain fields (eg immunology, renal) and world reknowned centres (eg liver, renal, cancer). The teaching in clinicals is generally very good, being such a large diverse city the potential exposure to cases is vast
- Excellent city - fantastic nightlife and shopping, without the extra expense of London accomodation.
- massive year group (also a disadvantage- see below) - you meet a huge number of people and thats when medschool becomes epic
- MedSoc - following on from the previous point, a huge year group means a lot of money pouring into MedSoc allowing you to join some amazing societies (eg sports teams) or you can be given money to set a new one up!! They also put on a huge number of social events
- the actual medschool is open 24-hours a day! - sounds geeky, but great for boshing out work/revision (cramming). our computers have free printing too!


CONS:
- preclinical teaching is weak - primarily anatomy (although they have just built a brand new prosectorium so it will be interesting to see how much that helps). Very intense number of preclinical lectures, with disporportionately fewer small group teaching sessions.
- massive year group- causes several problems: 1) "Small group" teaching sessions (preclinical) are not so "small" and therefore become less personal and the quality of teaching is understandably compromised. 2)Huge strain on the library (which has never grown with the intake) - a lot of books are out of date and the popular ones are snapped up quickly (leaving only the "short loan" books).
- a lot of useless/irrelevant stuff is thrown at us (mainly preclinical lectures).
- some frustrating SSAs to complete- these modules have been made basically to satisfy the GMC's cirriculum/requirements. You'll hear the phrase "jumping through hoops" a lot (similar to most other medschools I'd imagine)

one fing - getting opinions for a medstudent sometime is non-sensical.

an example - the opinion of a posh medstudent in my class is that loughborough has no available chicks. he is referring of course to the university.
so he's never walked around town and seen any of the thousands of (non student) chicks his age out in loughborough's streets everyday.

the little posh skool **** is so cut off from normal society that he doesnt see them or non-student peeple,you see.

so dont always go on the opinion of a med student.

Sorry what?

Anyway, what exactly happens during a prosection, is absolutely no touching allowed or are you given individual parts to observe? Did anyone feel like they were missing by not doing dissection.

You are allowed to touch and feel in Prosection. Just not change anything (ie dissect). You use parts and also the whole cadaver - eg a limb for musculoskeletal or thorax (rarely cut off from the whole body). Prosection is good as long as you have enough time on it in small groups

Oh that's pretty good then, it is basically the same except you don't do the actual cutting yourself.

Why do some med schools not allow dissection?

Lack of donated cadavars. To do each dissection requires a 'new' cadaver, whereas prosected specimens can be reused.