Don’t get me wrong, I love Medicine and being a medical student, but sometimes I just really want to hurry up and start working as a doctor! Some of my friends however, love being students so much that they’ve done iBSCs (which are optional at Leicester) to extend the experience. But for me, now I’ve got my first jobs sorted (academic F1 in Wales next year), the urge to become Dr Wiseman has become stronger than ever. Seeing as I’ve got another year of Medicine to go, I decided to compile a list of the top things about being a medical student. After all, I think it’s a topic worth discussing: when you went to your medical school interview they asked you “Why do you want to be a doctor?” not “Why do you want to be a medical student?”, yet we spend between four and six years in training before we become doctors. Anyway, have a read of my list and add your own comments at the bottom. 1.You beat the competition: congratulations, making it this far shows that you are both extremely intelligent and extremely motivated! You’ve beaten a competition ratio of at least 7:1 (that’s right at least 7:1 odds, in some med schools up to 13:1)1to gain your place at medical school! That should definitely leave you smug and glowing throughout your degree. 2.Long student life: ok, I may moan about being a medical student (a bit useless on the wards, running low on money) but it can be pretty cool. We get to justify dressing however we like (when not on the wards), hangovers, discussing in intricate detail the merits of free lunches and hanging out in artsy bars discussing artsy topics with artsy people because, hey, we’re still at university. And student discounts really are great- money off shops and hairdressers, and Microsoft Office for £50- brilliant. 3.We’ll have a (pretty much) guaranteed job after graduation: ok, so the shake-ups over the Foundation Programme have proven that not all of us may be sure we’ll get a job straight away, but the majority of us will get F1 jobs on leaving university. Medicine is an excellent and lucrative career (according to a recent article it’s the second best paying job you can have)2, that gives you the opportunity to work anywhere in the world. And the satisfaction of knowing that what we do is going to make a difference in many people’s lives; what’s better than that? 4.Time to practise the art and science of medicine: being a doctor is very difficult (generating differentials, calculating drug doses), tiring (night shifts, early mornings, long days), and political (trying to keep the nurses and patients’ families on-side). So, we as medics do need our long apprenticeship: we need time to learn all the subtleties of being a doctor that you can’t get from in lectures but have to learn on the wards by experience, such as how to deal with anxious parents, how best to comfort an elderly person who is dying. These skills can only be learnt by watching someone more experienced do them. I remember chatting with a friend before we started the clinical years, saying that I felt ready to be a doctor now, what did I need a further 3 years of clinical training for? How really, really, ridiculously wrong I was. We need time to learn to cannulate without any pressure on us to do it, knowing there’s at least one doctor on the ward who can take over if we fail. And we get to cherry pick the best areas of medicine: don’t want to go to a 6th endoscopy session? You don’t have to go, because you’re still a student; it’s not yet your job. 5.Social activism: medics are definitely the most socially active group of people I’ve ever met. As students, we still have all that drive and care about society that made us choose medicine as a career, but having more time on our hands than doctors means that we have to put all that latent brilliance somewhere. And we do, whether it’s by teaching our peers or joining organisations such as Medsin, we love to give something back. As a medical student, I feel really empowered to make a difference through voluntary work, which is why I set up an Outreach programme for Leicester students called MedReach. A colleague of mine on this project who works for the university commented that when she set up a similar project before and opened it up to Biological Sciences students and medics, one of the former replied whilst about fifty medics were interested. Even though we’re not yet doctors, we really are making a difference to a lot of lives. And so that’s my top 5 of medical student life. From knowing we beat the competition, to being given plenty of time to learn our trade, to knowing that as medical students we can still make a difference, I hope that this list will help remind people like me who can’t wait to be doctors that being a student is pretty good too. What are your top 5 things about being a medical student? Source
