All entries for Thursday 10 September 2015

Ready, set, CV!

Next week I will be entering the Medical School as a fully-fledged second year medical student. After a very long summer holiday I’m feeling a little apprehensive about going back, will I remember anything from last year? Will I remember the different sections when taking a history and can I still use my stethoscope? At the same time I’m feeling very excited to enter the next stage of my medical training, I’m looking forward to going back onto the wards and I’m really looking forward to starting our GP placements.

Among all this clinical experience I still have regular lectures until Christmas so I’m also looking forward to covering topics from last year in more detail and also learning topics that were deemed too complicated for last year – well actually, I’m a bit more nervous about that last one!

As this will have been most students' last long summer holiday, people have tried to make the most of it. I got the chance to conduct a research project over the summer after receiving a bursary from the Undergraduate Research Support Scheme at Warwick. My project has been to conduct a systematic review looking at the longitudinal relationship between short sleep duration and obesity in children and adolescents.

I’ve learnt lots of new skills that are used a lot in clinical research such as how to construct and conduct selective searches in a variety of scientific databases and have also become much more able to critically appraise scientific papers which again is a useful skill to have in medicine. I’m quite interested in combining research with clinical work in the future so using my last long summer to do a project like this has been really beneficial to me and will be a good addition to my CV. While I may only be entering my second year, medicine moves fast and the CV building doesn’t stop when you get into medical school.

Having attended the Royal College of Psychiatrists conference at the start of the summer and hearing about all the work the society is doing to boost recruitment to this specialty by supporting medical students and student societies, I decided to get more involved in the Warwick Psychiatry Society.

There are a wide variety of societies in the medical school and most specialties are represented. Getting involved in a student society is also a great addition to your CV and can help show interest in preparation for future job applications so it’s worth thinking about how you can best use your time in Medical School. The PsychSoc is relatively new and small and when I asked if they needed any help this year I didn’t expect to be asked to be treasurer! Despite having no experience of this at all I decided to give it a go and with help from the president and vice president we now have an official society bank account and successfully applied for funding from the Royal College of Psychiatrists. This is a big boost to the PsychSoc and I’m really looking forward to helping the society expand over the coming year. Make sure to look out for us in induction week to get some freebies!

I’m also looking forward to becoming a parent… a Medic parent that is! Having benefited a lot from the wisdom of my Medic Dad during my first year I’m looking forward to doing the same for another unsuspecting student in a few weeks’ time!

Megan Earle : 10 Sep 2015 08:18 |  Tags: Joanne Mbchb Student Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem