St George's Medical School - A Taste of Medicine Yr12 Spring School

So this is a post about the spring school taking place over the spring half term between the 2nd April 2012 until the 5th April 2012.

This post is only about the first two days (out of the four so far) so the 2nd and 3rd April 2012.

So the 2nd April:

First we had the "welcome to the spring school" speech and an intro to the mentors and things. What I love about the mentors is that some didn't take the traditional path into medicine. One of them applied to med school three times before getting accepted the third time! Another did a biomedical science degree then transferred into the med school at St Georges. It taught me that if medicine is your passion you should NEVER give up on it. If you keep trying, you will get there, and I respect them for that. I have no idea whether I'll have the strength to pick myself up again and keep trying if I got rejected.

Oh interesting fact: Harry Hill studied medicine at St Georges. I knew he had studied medicine but not at St Georges! It just goes to show that you don't have to stay in that career you could always change!

Anyway we had a tour of the university. It is a pretty nice university I love the fact that it is directly connected to the hospital so if you're ever feeling stressed out, you'd just look at the hospital and remember why you're doing the course. Then we went to the Pathology museum - AMAZINGGG! - some of the specimens there are really fascinating. The ones that caught my attention the most were the ectopic pregnancies where you could actually see the foetuses still in the womb. They were so tiny. I swear just by looking at them I almost convinced myself to become a neo-natal doctor! But a girl will always change her mind! We also had some work sheets to do so I'll see if I can scan them in and upload them onto the blog.

We then had a workshop on how St Georges do their interviews - MMI (Multi Mini Interviews) so you have each question asked in a mini station just going round. There are 8 stations where you'll spend about 5 minutes each. I'll do a separate post on that as well!

Finally, at the end of the day we had a talk about getting in medical school from the admissions tutor of St Georges, Dr Muriel Shannon.

3rd April 2012:


Today was mostly clinical skills so the skills we did were:

• Blood pressure - How to get the blood pressure using a sphygmomanometer
• Organs - So just learning about organs in general
• CPR - Learning DR ABC
• Learning how to feel the location of a baby in a pregnant woman (Loved this one!)
• Bones
• Ultrasound to listen to the pulse.

I actually learnt things today! For instance, places you could get the pulse in; the carotid artery in the neck, the brachial artery near your biceps, the radial artery (your wrist), the femoral artery (groin area), the posterial tibia (near your ankle) and the dorsalis pedis (near your big toe). I can't believe I remembered it, but it was so fascinating!

Oh, plus I got a free stethoscope, and it actually works so the last two days have motivated me and medicine is something I DEFINATLY want to do!

The Hospital - You have to literally walk through the hospital to get to the medical school.

Some of the freebies I've gotten from the two days