12.29.09
Mobile mind up for grabs
If anyone is interested in quick purchase of the concept/source code for mobile mind. Drop me a email.
No pulse?
As many of you know, I’ve taken a back seat from software while I complete (or at least attempt) to complete a medical degree.
It’s probably two years since I made a serious decision to change career. Back then, I decided to test the waters of returning to education by taking evening classes in A-Level biology and Chemistry. It was fun, aside from sitting in an exam hall with 16 years and being told off by the teacher who was probably younger than me.
Moving on, I chose the relatively recently available pathway of the graduate entry route into medicine which means that you must have already obtained a degree (in any subject) before applying. You still have to go through the UCAS admissions process, which means filling in a 64 line personal statement about how bright and caring and into science that you are. Apparently some schools stopped looking at the personal statement because one year they had a huge percentage start with the phrase “I first became interested in science when I burnt my parents carpet with my chemistry set” – A line lifted directly out of a best selling “how to get into medschool” book.
The plus side of such a degree is that it’s only 4 years compared to the 5 endured by school levers. The downside is that to even get an interview you may need to pass an excruciating exam called the GAMSAT (~£250).
GAMSAT is a day long exam that test skills in reasoning in the humanities, written communication and reasoning in the science. I spent a good few weeks preparing for that: Writing a couple of essays a day and cramming physics and organic chemistry (Incidentally, Organic Chemistry I Workbook for Dummies
The hardest thing about the GAMSAT is that there is no syllabus, and advice for preparation is somewhere between “degree level biology, and organic chemistry”, or “you can’t prepare for the exam”. The reality is that even though a lot of the questions are common sense, you do benefit from a good grounding in the mechanism and principles underpinning the biological sciences. Those claiming that you can’t prepare are likely to be competing students eager to get into the top 20% for interview selection.
Here is a paper which is pretty representative of the exam I sat:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/20936224/GAMSAT-Prognostic-Paper
I scraped through the GAMSAT, scoring strongest on the the essay writing. Funny enough I did a lot of practice on this blog with one of my attempts being published on the register.
Side note: If you are interested in studying Medicine. Don’t be put off by the GAMSAT – prepare a little and have a go as you might be surprised how well you do (or at least how badly the rest of the cohort does). Just keep practising your essays and answer all the science questions. And don’t feel you have to sign up to the one of many opportunistic training courses which can cost >£2000-£3000; They will probably help, but you can do it yourself just as well.
I got a reject from Kings (I messed up the UKCAT exam), an unconditional offer from Southampton and interviews from Swansea and St George’s. The interviews were pretty horrible with the uncomfortable juxtaposition of questions such as “what you do to relax” to “imagine you are a GP who has filled in a prescription incorrectly and the patient has died as a result of your mistake…how would you feel?”. Overall, I thought St George’s were really professional and very fair with their process and I was pleased to be able to accept their offer.
I’m now one term in having completed my Christmas exams. The course is pretty bonkers: Learning all the major diseases, anatomy/physiology, pharmacology and clinical skills as well as the sociology and psychology and medical statistics at the same time is quite a burden. But the self directed learning time works very well since we can do bits on our own or form learning groups to go through difficult subjects.
One of the most striking aspects of the course is the diverse backgrounds of the students – some have done degrees in nursing, genetics, physiotherapy, mathematics or have come from the marketing jobs or even a couple -such as myself- from computing/IT.
The schedule is tough. And for this year I doubt if I will have any time to do write code/freelance. Although, in the future, I hope to be able to blend medicine and technology; There are an awful lot of problems in healthcare that might benefit from a little python script or two!
I won’t be posting much from now on, but I’ll leave you with an image of the main actions of the immune system which I drew during our PBL (problem based learning sessions).:
