Stepping onto the King's campus for the first time as a med student is one of the memories I'll never forget. I felt a combination of exhilaration and terror, a heady mix of pride combined with gratefulness for having been given a chance. Applying as a graduate, I had spent a lot of time preparing myself to accept rejection or being below the cutoff. I hadn't really prepared myself to accept the reality of *getting in*, and the feeling was overwhelming!
I stood milling around with about 400 other students outside the lecture room, feeling absolutely lost, and full of conflicting thoughts and feelings. I found myself looking around for other older faces, just to reassure myself that I wasn't the odd one out. There were some, but what I also noticed was that many of the students had that slightly lost expression (both older and younger), and that alone felt strangely reassuring.
The induction itself was everything you'd normally expect, brief talks on the difference between med school and high school, health & safety, fire, sickness, etc. We met representatives from the chaplaincy and the student union, and were welcomed by everyone. I felt a slight pang of regret at having not applied for accomodation in halls, it seemed there was such a vibrant community of life here.
Enrolment was nice and straight forward, and somehow I managed to avoid virtually any queuing (no idea how that happened), wandered from room to room filling out paperwork, handing in paperwork, getting a stack of booklets (still need to read them!), and getting my photo taken for the student ID card. Afterward I took a stroll around the campus to try and learn my way around a bit better.
It seemed the first lecture room we were in was the main one (big enough for 400 people), there were also multiple smaller rooms scattered around (for tutorials I'm guessing), an absolutely amazing museum (Gordon museum), the campus library seemed well-stocked and full of ample studying space, and a small cafe just below it looked like a great spot to have a cup of coffee each morning. All in all, I was really pleasantly surprised... the campus was *so* much nicer than the university I had previously studied at (naming no names
), that I couldn't shake the feeling of great gratitude for being there.
