The Life of a Researcher

This week I continued to teach first year students Basic Life Support. Over the last few weeks we have covered basic first aid, as well as skills such as dealing with bleeding, choking and drowning. Next week my group of first years have their exam to earn their qualifications and I have to say I’m nervous for them!

This year Warwick Medical School have established a new programme to develop our teaching skills, having the opportunity to work towards a certificate or qualification in teaching. This also includes lectures and workshops from members of the faculty on how to teach effectively and be the very best teachers we can be. Over the last few weeks I’ve attended a session on teaching theories and soon I will be attending workshops on group work, giving lectures and giving feedback. These are delivered by faculty members who have been involved in medical education and have years of experience in teaching medics, so we get a chance to learn from the best! It’s really exciting that all the peer teaching we do is recognised and supported by the medical school and that we also get a certificate for our portfolios and develop teaching skills for our future careers.

During this time, I have also been carrying on with my research project module and have been conducting further interviews over the last few weeks. The people I am interviewing have freely given their time, for which I am hugely grateful! I was supposed to be doing 10 interviews but have really struggled to get participants to take part, which is one of the challenges of doing a student research project where there is no funding and only 8 weeks to do the research. Added to this, my research is interviewing an underrepresented population who are traditionally hard to get to take part in research. I’ve certainly given myself a challenge! I have however enjoyed the slower pace of this module, with pretty much all of my time free for self-directed learning. It has been a welcome recovery period after the rollercoaster of first- and second-year medicine.

We also received our timetables for all of Phase III recently as well. Phase III is third and fourth year and makes up the final part of our course. We are split into streams and rotate around areas of medicine and surgery over the space of 18 months. My first placement is in Psychiatry, starting in January and lasting 6 weeks. I’m glad to have Psychiatry first as it is certainly one of my weaker areas and Psychiatric issues appear in other clinical settings such as GP, A+E etc. Getting a good strong ground in Psychiatry from the start will hopefully stand me in good stead for the rest of Phase III.

Eden Villiers : 31 Oct 2019 08:43 |  Tags: Jordan Mbchb Patients Student Wards Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem