Sorry this site was down for a bit – it seems to have been a Jack related router incident. It is up with a temporary fix at the moment.
This Friday I’ll be taking just over 2 weeks off work (*silent woohoo*). My favourite part of Christmas is definately the holiday, and it’s a time of year that I really appreciate being an academic and being able to take a full holiday. Kim always used to have to go back in to work on Boxing Day or some other stupid time when she worked in sales. Life is different now.
This week the students will have their first anatomy exam. I would say that for the first time I’m actually looking forward to an exam, but that would be untrue. I’m sick to the level that I used to look forward to exams when I was revising – I knew that once the exam was over the workload would drop, whatever the result. It was always a chance to use what I had learnt.
It has been a tough first term for the new medical students. That in itself is not unusual though, as the first term of a medicine degree marks a profound change in the lifestyles, mindsets and views towards the future for its participants. Before, there is a dream. Once it has begun, reality takes over. The dream’s still there, but reality modifies everything. You knew it was going to be hard work, but you never quite anticipated how hard work feels, how you were going to motivate yourself, or that it would be hard from the start. The brain seems to treat “hard work” in the same way it treats pain. You think you remember what it felt like, but you don’t. Only when it recurs do you realise this.
There’s a week of teaching and half a week of exams left until Christmas, when the students will get a chance to relax (for a short period – there are more exams after Christmas) and return to the lives they had before the course started. Traditionally this is the time that new medical students reflect on this huge change in the lives, which they thought they were prepared for but begin to think that this isn’t for them. So after Christmas there are usually some that drop out. Strangely, I don’t really expect this on our postgraduate course, but time will tell. There is a well known phenomenon within new medical students, where they feel that they shouldn’t be here, that they shouldn’t have been picked and sooner or later someone is going to find out. The truth of the matter is that if you crack on with the work you will learn what you need to learn, you will grow, and you will be the right person for the job. Our bunch are older than the undergraduate selection of medical students, so maybe most of them realise this?
As time has marched on towards their first anatomy exam (horror of horrors) the attitude to learning human structure has changed in most. Many wanted to be fed the secret knowledge. On the one hand this is impossible, and on the other it isn’t secret. It exists in hundreds of textbooks (and nowadays in DVDs and IT packages). You cannot be fed the knowledge of anatomy. You have to invest the time in understanding, learning, and storing it. Read, discuss, test. If they haven’t learnt that yet, then they’ll probably fail. And this first anatomy exam is also one of their “finals”. Its mark makes up part of the all important Intermediate MB examinations that occur midway along the course. Fail that, and you will not continue. And they must pass all of their exams along the way, at least at a resit attempt.
On a brighter note, I wish them all luck. Anatomy is a basic science of medicine, and a basic but thorough knowledge really will help them become quality doctors of the future.