typical day

[elise]

can any current students at edinburgh describe a typical day or week at the medschool plz?
i'm interested only cos of the city at the moment so i really want to know what the life and work is like. how difficult the lectures are to understand and what exactly do you do?
also, i wud really like to do an intercalated course to do with chemistry or bio/med/chem but i've heard its notoriously difficult to get onto a course at edinburgh?
thanx alot for any gratefully received help!

[boarderchick]

Hi edinburghmedic - I was wondering where you had got to!!

Cheers for that - I had no idea what to expect to be honest. Hope it's only exciting lectures at 9am because I have this nasty habit of falling asleep at morning in them!

What medics sports teams are there? Do most people join the uni teams or the medics ones (or both?)

[frh]

Hi edinburghmedic, just one quick question here: when I was at the visit day last month all the students who spoke to us complained that the anatomy teaching at Edinburgh was poor and/or that there wasn't enough of it. They seemed to think that everything else about the course was excellent - the basic science, the clinical teaching etc - it was only the anatomy they complained about. Is that your experience as well?

[frh]

How do you do it at Edinburgh? I'm not very clued up about what prosection, pro-dissection etc all mean!!!

[elise]

so whats the percentage of students that are considered good enough to do a the intercalated course plz?
thanx for the information btw, very useful.

[ohler]

i think they dissect it before the class,so you can see what your supposed to. I think this is probably a better idea, saves all the wasted time when ur hacking away only to find you've completely massacred what your meant to be lookin at, or there's the other end of the scale where your workin meticulously and run out of time!

[boarderchick]

Probably is a good idea to start with but it would be fun to get your hands dirty too don't you think?

I just got an unconditional from dundee tonight. Way to make my life difficult...

[procrastinator]

Hi, I'm a second year medic at Edinburgh (currently dossing around on tintynet instead of revising for my exams next week. Gah).

Prosection is a fine way to learn anatomy, though I have friends at other medical schools and I often feel they are being taught anatomy more comprehensively than I am. My friends at Leeds, Southampton and Aberdeen seem to know more detail than I do, but my friends at Newcastle and Stockton seem to do stuff to the same level as we do in Edinburgh.
Prosection basically means looking at a body that has already been cut up for you. You still get to "get your hands dirty" too though! Anatomy is very much "hands on" learning and you will be asked to locate and identify different structures. In first year anatomy is examined in two spot exams and in second year there is no formal examination of anatomy as such.
My main complaint with anatomy teaching at Edinburgh is that there is not enough of it. In second year I have recieved a grand total of 9 hours of teaching time in the anatomy labs. This was in a group of about 60 students, with approximately 15-20 people to a cadaver. The main reason for this is a shortage of anatomy teaching staff. I don't feel comfortable with my knowledge of anatomy, but I'm hoping this is caught up with in later years of the course.
(I still wouldn't have chosen any other medical school though. Edinburgh is lovely!)

As for intercalated honours, I've personally chosen not to do a BSc, though lots of people do. I think the way it works is that places for a BSc are offered to the top 90 people in the class at the end of second year (there are 248 people in my class, down from 259 at the start of first year). Not all of these people want to do a BSc though, so offers are then made to the next highest ranked people, until all the spaces are filled. You do the BSc inbetween 2nd and 3rd years and then go into the class the year below you to do third year afterwards.
I think doing a BSc is probably a good move for your career, but it wasn't for me. I wanted to get on with my rotations in third year and qualify in 2008 rather than 2009. Doing a BSc means being taken out of your class to be put into a class of fourth year science students. You have a lot of catching up to do in a short space of time to get up to the same level as them. From speaking to friends in the year above who have spent this year doing a BSc, it seems like a very stressful year of study. Some people doing genetics projects got depressed studying zebra fish etc when all their friends in third year were out on the wards doing exciting clinical stuff. You have to be really interested in your subject of study to make a BSc worthwhile, I think.

I know very little about medics sports teams because I avoid sport at all costs.

Hope that helps. Sorry if I ranted a bit. Edinburgh Medical School really is very nice indeed. Revision stress must be getting to me.

[ohler]

aberdeen are starting to do prosections next year (2005), a trend maybe?