Before the End, the Beginning

Next week marks the start of our finals-exams period, and with it comes the usual mix of emotions. Because so much is riding on the next few weeks, I’m nervous and anxious (I think there’d be something wrong if I weren’t), but I’m also pretty excited and looking forward to seeing what it’ll be like. We’ve put so much effort into the past few weeks, months and, yes, years that it will be interesting to see what sorts of topics we are examined on, and how it comes about. I’m looking forward to applying my knowledge.

On the one hand, it’s daunting because the scope of material we can be asked about is just so broad: the body of knowledge that a medical student is expected to have upon graduation is truly vast. I don’t quite know what I was expecting, but there is just so much to know! On the other hand, we have spent years accumulating knowledge, building upon it and putting it into practice. This in itself is really important to bear in mind when coming up to exams: sometimes it feels like we’ve not learned a lot, but in reality we all know a lot more than we realise or give ourselves credit for. And yet on another hand, I think that by this point most people just want exams to be behind us. We want them to start but, more importantly, we also want them to end.

Our first round of exams this time is the OSCE segment. This stands for Objective Structured Clinical Examination. Normally we have our written exams first, but it’s swapped round for finals – I don’t know why. For this exam (as in Phase II), OSCEs take place on one day. The entire cohort is split in two; half the cohort is assigned to a morning slot and half the cohort gets an afternoon slot. We are split into groups of about 12 students and each of these cycles through a set of ten stations (with a couple of rest stations built in) – and of course several cycles run concurrently. Once the morning group are done, they are sequestered in a room until the afternoon group starts – the purpose of this is to avoid anyone from the morning group sharing information about stations with anyone from the afternoon group. The set-up of doing all stations in one shot is actually fantastic if not exhausting – in our first year, OSCEs were three or four stations spread over four days and everyone was very tired of it by the end of the last day. This way, at least they will all be out of the way at once and we can focus on the written component, which is coming up next week.

One key element to our education process that often gets overlooked is that we as students need to pay due attention to our own mental health as individuals. Since this is such an all-consuming point in a pretty demanding course, it is really easy to let the little things slip – exercise, eating well, taking breaks, etc. We all want to do so well (or even just make it through) that we focus perhaps too much on revision to the exclusion of much else. I’ve started forcing myself to go swimming again a couple of times per week, if nothing else just to make sure I have an outlet for my energy and that I sleep better at night. So far, it seems to be paying off!

John

Joshua Galvin : 12 Feb 2018 09:34 |  Tags: John Mbchb Student Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem