Update-yness!

Hello!

Long time no speaketh! I've been extremely busy just recently, not that that really surprised me. Ahh we have done so much, and in such a short period of time.

The lectures continue to come thick and fast. My OneNote system is working fantastically for me, allowing me to organise all of my notes and include helpful diagrams as well. OneNote doesn't do much tracking of the notes you write but you can export it as a PDF, then import that PDF into Word...anyway, so right now I have about 65000 words of notes, over more than 300 pages! We look at each other and wonder how on Earth we're going to study all of that for the final end of year exams, where everything that we've learnt in the year will be assessed. It's going to be intense I'm sure.

Speaking of assessment, I had one of those recently! It was our first one. Below is the very nice bell curve of results:

Guess where I was! Right smack bang on top of that curve. I got basically the average mark, which is far, far from where I want to be unfortunately. So it's time to knuckle down and get my groove on! The test was on only lecture content that we did between the start of the year and the day of that test, but we have a test coming up in I think about 4 weeks that will assess the lectures we've had since, PLUS the content of the labs from the whole year thus far! I have a few friends that are second year med students here, and they say that everyone sort of does ok in the first test, and then gets demolished in the second test. I intend to not be one of those people that gets demolished :P Things will be better for the next test!

Some exciting news! The QS World University Rankings just released their 2012/13 lists, and Medicine at the University of Melbourne is number 9 in the world! We're basically only behind big names like John Hopkins, Oxford, Harvard etc! That blew my mind, and I think I have told everyone I can about it. I am so proud to be here, and hope my cohort can be the one to take us higher!

We have been doing some pretty interesting things here recently. In our Principles of Clinical Practice subjects we sometimes get patients to come in so that we can practice interviewing them, in a fishbowl format so that the other people in the class sit there and watch you, so that you can get feedback on your interviewing afterwards. I did mine last week, and I stressed about it a lot beforehand. When he introduced himself he said he had shortness of breath, and that's fine, but then he said he also had a smoker's cough...well, basically I had to interview him not just about his shortness of breath, but his cough too, AND his smoking habits haha. It actually went extremely well though! The patient, when the interview was finished, basically as soon as our tutor asked him to give feedback he pretty much exploded with praise, he was so animated and it seemed like he was extremely impressed! He said that he felt extremely comfortable with my interview style, that there was a great flow and he felt like I had really given him a lot of sympathy and listened to what he had to say. I was stoked with that!! Then other people in the group were able to give me feedback, and it was all much the same. I was pretty happy with that!

I think the last time I posted I was still doing cardiovascular medicine? Well, we're actually up to gastrointestinal medicine now, having completed respiratory already. Basically, everything we do seems to revolve around diarrhoea. We have seen some not so pretty pictures, let me tell you that...the worst have been pictures of parasitic worms. My god. And someone had the idea of eating parasites so that they would eat all the extra food that we eat that we don't need, to stave off obesity...no thanks.

College is going great too. I probably aren't leaving my room as much as I should though, because it's so easy to stay in my room! The meals here seem to have become stuck in a rut of not being all that great...having said that, there was a curry tonight that was pretty good! They have a fondness for soggy brown rice, which is disgusting.

That's probably a big enough post now, I'll post again soon when I think of something interesting.

Regards,

Circle