Here's an interesting read sent to us from Lakers School, Berry Hill, written by one of their yr11 pupils, who quite frankly puts my writing skills to shame. It's great to see young people enjoying their education. Francesca has recently received results from exams taken during the snow, and like many more in her class is celebrating scores of 97% and more in Business Studies, Maths, Chemistry, Physics and Biology.
Article for link-Improve Your Chances of Becoming a Doctor careers Conference. 27.02.2010
On Friday 26th February, I set out on a five hour journey to my sister’s house in St. Albans, in preparation for a conference the next day. After cooking dinner (chicken stir-fry) and a short film session (Black Hawk Down) I finally got to bed, only to wake up again at 7.30 ready to get on the tube to UCL! The conference was called ‘Improve Your Chances of Becoming a Doctor’- I can only hope it will! Our day began at 10 ‘o’ clock, once all 400 of us had been registered, and split into two groups-200 to each lecture theatre. Frances Scott, the organiser of the conference gave us a brief overview of the medical profession at around 10.45-slightly late, but we soon caught up! We were then talked through the admissions process, which was mainly geared towards students in the lower sixth form, as they will be completing their applications soon; however, much of it was relevant to younger students, like myself. This was by Dr Brenda Cross, a Faculty Tutor and Sub-Dean for UCL Medical School, and was followed by a short break (and lots of chocolate biscuits!).
Following this was a talk by Dr David Gaunt, an Accident and Emergency Consultant at Watford General Hospital. His talk was entitled ‘Many Years to the Top of the Tree’ (18 in fact). Dr Gaunt detailed mostly the ‘old’ system of training-giving us many anecdotes about when he was a young doctor (and how he managed to fail his MB BS 7 times) which had the entire lecture theatre in stitches. Then he told us about how medical careers have been modernised, and gave us a detailed flow chart explaining how each year of medical training is spent, and the different routes people can take. After this, we had lunch with selected medical students (and in true Frankie fashion, I went back for thirds!). We were able to ask the students anything about the courses they were taking, and I had lunch with Andre (a medical student at Imperial), and two friends I made during the day, Vanessa and Afshan, in the beautiful cloisters at the University. We got into a very long talk about what A-levels I should take next year, and now I have a pretty clear idea of what I need to do! When it came to the whole group Question and Answer session with three of the medical students (Andre, Sam and Oli), I had no questions left! The next talk was from Dr Vijay Shanmuganathan, a Specialist Ophthalmic Registrar, who told us about ‘Living in a Niche’. His message was that ‘common things occur commonly’, and had some interesting pictures of patients suffering from cataracts, diabetes, and glaucoma’s, compared with healthy people, which was the highlight of his lecture. The downturn of his lecture was when he informed us that neurosurgery and cardiothoracic surgery are the two most competitive areas of medicine-not good news for me, who has always wanted to specialise in either of these!
There was then a brief talk on alternative careers to medicine-which was very short, as the purpose of the day was to aid our careers in medicine! Next, we were told how to ‘Make Medicine What You Want’, by Dr Ranya Zeineldine. She is currently a senior house officer, and is about to become a GP-which she was very excited about. She was able to give us more information about her time at university, informing us of the advantages of doing an elective in Belize and an intercalated bachelor’s degree in physiology, which seemed so far ahead of me, I was overwhelmed. Then Dr Zeineldine gave us some potential cases, and asked us how we would go about treating them. This was possibly the best part of the day, after I correctly diagnosed diabetes in one of the scenarios, and was told by Dr Zeineldine that I needn’t bother with medical school-I was very disappointed with this, as the students couldn’t speak of it highly enough!
Frances then drew the day to a close, with some short conclusions, and then ran to find my sister, following some rushed goodbyes to my new friends. We walked back to the station-I managed to look like the biggest tourist ever when I took out the camera out to take a picture of the huge escalators at the station! We managed to squeeze in a shopping spree on Oxford Street before we went out for the night. Needless to say, I had to set my alarm to get up in time for my train the next morning!
By Frankie Cackett Y11
