Thursday 12 April 2012

Medicine Men Go Wild

Seeing as I have nothing better to write about, I thought I would share this television programme with all you medical people out there. It's called "Medicine Men Go Wild" and is about two English doctors (who also happen to be identical twins) who find out about how medicine is practised in remote areas of the world. I found it very interesting; the doctors take part in some quite frightening rituals and unusual healing methods as they live alongside people from different cultures. If you have access to Channel 4 on demand, I would recommend it. 


http://www.channel4.com/programmes/medicine-men-go-wild/4od

Sunday 1 April 2012

UCAS is over...

...and my future has been decided. After 6 long months of waiting, that feeling of uncertainty has finally been lifted. I am now certain that I will be spending my university years up in Aberdeen. I didn't have to make this choice myself, seeing as Aberdeen was my only offer, but I'm still incredibly pleased.
There are a number of reasons why I'm happy with this outcome. Firstly, when I visited Aberdeen Medical school to attend my interview,  I felt very welcome. All the staff and students that I met were really friendly and I thought the tour of the medical facilities was a nice added touch. Even during my interview, I felt as though the interviewers genuinely wanted to learn more about my personality and attributes, as opposed to the "checklist" method used at Glasgow, where they simply tick off boxes when you say the right thing. Although I appreciate that selecting medical students is a very difficult task, I don't really agree with the way certain medical schools decide who to accept. Using Glasgow again as an example, they do not invite applicants to be interviewed unless they achieve a UKCAT score over a certain cut-off (around 650 in past years). I think this is unfair as there will be many excellent applicants who would probably become great doctors, but are not given the chance to show their strengths because they under-performed in a silly IQ-style test. 


Anyway, that's enough slagging Glasgow off for now. Maybe I'm just a little bit bitter that they rejected me after interview. I don't know. What point I really tried to make was that Aberdeen treated me like a person, and not just another applicant they felt obliged to question, and that means something to me. I have a feeling that I'm going to really enjoy my time up there; September can't come quick enough!