Year 1, Semester 1 Summary

And...Semester 1 is a wrap! It's gone by so fast, and we're already 12 weeks into teaching. Medical school has started off on a confusing tangent, there are so many things I'm discovering along the way, and it has been a lot of work to manage.

However, it was really exciting and new to me. I've hit my personal milestones e.g trying on my first stethoscope and choosing my own colour (I really wanted to choose pink, but ended up with a beautiful blue colour instead). I was able to enter the dissection room for the first time, and see and touch a cadaver, as well as various other organs. Its been a surreal experience and I'm still adapting to the fact that I made it this far! (And also, the fact I'll be here till 2027, which is a while away.)

In induction week, we were introduced to the course structure. We have Medicine 1, a topic covered in Semester 1, Medicine 2 which covers the respiratory system, and also practicals in the dissection room. This year we have 3 hospital visits and 2 GP visits, my first hospital visit is in two weeks time when I go back to uni! I've had 2 progress tests so far, we had them 6 weeks apart, and the style was multiple choice. Throughout first year we have 6 seminar sessions, and they're in small groups so it's much more nicer and comfortable to have open discussions with the group and our seminar tutor. We've gone through topics such as doctor patient consultations and note taking, it was so interesting to see what the abbreviations that doctors use in their patient notes means, and so nerve-racking when we role played within our groups.

My favourite sessions are clinical skills which is hands on, where we've learnt the proper hand washing technique before examining a patient, as well as measuring blood pressure, and pulse rates in different locations. It's also a nice way to meet new medical students, considering there are much more medical students in lectures that I've never spoken to before. Also, I attended a Basic Life Support training course which is compulsory to all medical students; it was so informative and educational to hear about the trainers experiences doing CPR in real life situations whilst working as a paramedic.

Medicine 1 as a module consisted of various topics, some learned during A-Levels and the rest beyond A-Level knowledge. One of the biggest but obvious shocks to me was how many lectures we were given each day, and if I didn't get to finish it the same day it would just pile up into a dangerous workload. I'm still catching up with some of the topics right now in my Christmas holidays, but I'm hoping to be fully caught up before I head back to uni and start Medicine 2. The topics we covered included:

• Cells, Tissues, Organs

• DNA

• Embryology

• Enzymes

• Epidemiology

• Behavioural Sciences

• Immunology

• Metabolism

• Nervous System

• Pharmacology

My biggest realisation in Semester 1 was that Anki is my new best friend, and going to be my best friend for next 4 years! There are so many great learning hacks on the app such as Cloze and Image Occlusion- I'll do another post on using Anki. It's also much easier to use someone else's Anki notes e.g older friends. I found an amazing deck of Anki cards on the ankiweb which literally saved me so much time and effort, and I will forever be grateful to the Anki user who made them (I have no clue who it is). Semester 2 I'll have to make my own notes as I don't have anyones notes right now; the days look so packed and much more busy considering we have dissection, hospital and GP visits. I'm so scared for the next semester, but hopefully I'll get through it without much trouble and piling workload- wish me luck!