Shadman Ahmed

Hey everyone, I’m Shadman and I’m a Pathway student from Cohort 3. I recently started my first year of medical school at the University of Birmingham. It’s definitely been an interesting year to apply for medical school, as you can probably figure out, but nonetheless I’m glad to finally move past the months of uncertainty, sitting at home for A Level ‘results’ and embark on the exciting journey that is university. So, as you can probably already figure out, the summer obviously wasn’t the end of the pandemic, and so my medical school career, like everyone else, has started with a very different style of learning than previous years.

For starters, I was planning on moving from Wolverhampton to live in Birmingham, closer to the university so I can fully embrace the university lifestyle. However at the last minute, I put this off and decided to stay at home. Moving out is a huge step for many students and one that people do for many reasons. They may have to move away from home as they have chosen a university which is too far to commute, or it could be to enjoy the newfound independence of being a young adult. Or, if you’re like me, the main reason was because I was aware that I’d have to attend lectures five days a week and it would be much more manageable to live on campus! However, with the university announcing a blended approach to teaching this year in the wake of Covid-19, whereby lectures are recorded sessions which are uploaded online, I found myself losing the incentive to leave home.

The last six weeks have been a rollercoaster to say the least and I think the best way to go through it would be by going week by week. So here it is, my first six weeks of medical school! 

Freshers Week

Freshers week, or welcome week, is often the highlight of many people’s first year. The excitement of starting university has all led to this point where you’re a week away from your real learning to start, but you’re here and have met some of the people who you’ll be sharing your course with. Personally, I’m not much of a party person, but was looking forward to breaking into university with a bang. However, this wasn’t possible this year. On the first day of welcome week, I decided to go into campus for my first Zoom sessions with my M (Medicine) Group and that was quite nice. It was nice to get a feel for the university I’d be spending the next five years of my life at and the uncharacteristic warm weather in September made the green spaces perfect for doing Zoom sessions.

The rest of the week was from home, doing various introductory lectures online, and just getting used to the software we would have to use for online learning. Definitely very unconventional and probably unlike any medical education before this year! Yes, even in a year like this, medicine is still very full on and we had a number of introductory lectures to get us prepared and understand the structure of the course. It was quite overwhelming but it’s best to not look at it as the whole five years and take it a week at a time.

Week 1

The first week consisted of an introduction to each of our semester one modules. I’ve split my time into one module a day as the medical school recommend, however in hindsight looking back, this didn’t work at all. You will not be able to keep up with your work unless you prepare for the next module the previous day. Going into an SGT (Small Group Teaching) session without the right knowledge really does put you at a disadvantage when it comes to getting your head around the heavy content in medicine. This is the timetable that I’ve been following, to some extent, and it does help with planning out your week.

As our Year 1 lead has said, medicine is like a full-time job, if you’re putting in any less time, it’s likely that you will struggle. Just to break down the acronyms a bit (trust me, they turn everything into an acronym) MTM is Molecules to Man, CEP is Cell Communication, Endocrinology and Pharmacology, PPP is People, Patients and Populations, CBM is Community Based Medicine, PAS is Professional and Academic Skills, and NAS is Neurons and Synapses. CBM and PAS alternate so we do one of them each week. RA1 which takes up the prominent position of consuming every day is Regional Anatomy 1, although it is integrated into other modules such as MTM, CEP and NAS quite often. To further make it easier to understand, I would describe MTM as being biology related, CEP being chemistry related, PPP being sociology related, CBM being your GP placements, PAS being your university skills, and NAS being biology related too. Also PPP which is on Wednesday’s is a half day (just means they don’t expect you to work all day), so PPP doesn’t really have interactive SGT’s. Now that we’ve got the definitions out of the way, hopefully it’ll make things easier to follow and provide you with some understanding about what you might study.

As I said, this week was mainly introductory lectures, all of which were recorded for each module. They’re accessed through an online Virtual Learning Environment called Canvas. The first week wasn’t too bad since the level of knowledge was fairly shallow, or at least shallow compared to the weeks coming.

Week 2

Week 2 is definitely when things started getting a bit more intense, with the introductions out of the way, the lecturers had free reign to expose us to much more detailed concepts and mechanisms. CEP was especially difficult with all types of protein receptors and drug actions on them. This is the first week of PAS as well. The PAS session would be my first on campus session, so that was exciting. It occupied the whole day and consisted of two teaching sessions, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, with the time in between spent creating an oral presentation without some members of my M Group to present to the rest.

Week 3

This week unsurprisingly, the content got more in depth, but the only difference I feel worth discussing is my first week of CBM. Now, in a normal year this would be going into a GP every 2 weeks, with 6 others who have been placed with you in your year. This year it’s still 6 of us, but only 2 of us can go in, so we’ll only be going in once a semester (although this has been cancelled now due to the second lockdown) so we’ll basically not be getting any GP placements this year, except for the lucky two who got randomly selected before the lockdown restrictions were announced. However, the virtual sessions which lasts from 9 AM to 4 PM with your GP Tutor are very useful and working with a doctor who is clinically practicing, teaching from their workplace is still invaluable experience. I was placed at a very large GP practice in West Bromwich, however, know others in my M Group who were placed in much smaller practices in the outskirts of Worcester. It’s all randomly allocated so it’s quite exciting to see where you’ll be placed for the year. I bought a stethoscope as advised by the medical school and practice and was so excited to use it, but I guess it’ll mostly just remain on top of my wardrobe for now.

Week 4

We’ve started getting into the rotation of things now with everything under full swing. By now, we’ve all got accustomed to basics of learning at medical school, although this doesn’t mean it’s got easy. It just means that we’re not completely confused about our schedule and know that we’ll probably have to do specific things on a specific day. Asides from that, this is the final time I’ll be going onto campus for a while, especially with the new lockdown restrictions, it’s probably the last time this year and it’s for a very exciting reason! It’s my turn to visit the prosectorium. As you may or may not know, Birmingham doesn’t do dissection, and instead opts for prosection where professional demonstrators do the cutting and slicing to expose the key anatomy that you’ll need to become accustomed with. Visiting the prosectorium was definitely quite nerve-wracking, especially since I had been separated from my M Group due to coronavirus safety precautions limiting the amount of people who can visit the area at the same time. This means my M Group which was split in two, had visited earlier this week and I had been placed in an artificial M Group with others who had to be separated. The experience was honestly very surreal, and makes you appreciate the complexity of the human body. Learning from diagrams is one thing, but seeing the real thing is totally different. Nothing is perfect like the diagrams; everything is squashed together but separate. It’s an experience that can only be understood by living through it.

Week 5 and Week 6

We had our normal teaching PAS one week and CBM the other, along with the regular semester one modules. However, from Week 5 we started our NAS Anatomy sessions. I just realised I forgot to mention this properly, but for topics like MTM and CEP we have weekly anatomy sessions through Zoom with a demonstrator who goes through the anatomy of a specific part of the body, so for example we had done the pituitary gland in CEP the previous week. These NAS anatomy session were definitely a step up though. On week 5 it was basic topography of the brain, which let me just say, is anything but basic. This is probably the point where it hit me that the things you hear about learning anatomy is true, it’s so much! In week 6, this was even more, where we had to learn about each cranial and spinal nerve individually, by name, the place and name where it enters/leaves the skull, the anatomical relations of each one as well as the function and specific muscles or areas they innervate. It is overwhelming and I’m quite overwhelmed myself, but hopefully the next time I can give an update I can tell you which learning techniques I used to become fluent in the cranial and spinal nerves.

Week 7

Week 7 is next week, so obviously I can’t tell you what happened in it, but I wanted to briefly touch up on it since it’s no normal week. There are no lectures or teaching sessions next week. You’ve probably guessed what it is, it’s formative assessment week, or mock exam week. This is the first time we’ll be able to actually see what we’ve learnt over the last 6 weeks be put into exam practice. I’m so glad it’s formative, as I feel grossly underprepared for anything substantial now. Summative exams, so not mocks and the real deal, are in January as soon as we get back from Christmas break so it’s going to be a busy few months following the results of the formatives to get prepared for those. At Birmingham, Year 1 exams do contribute towards your final decile so it’s even more important to make sure you do your best!

The end of the first year as a medical student is in sight

Hi everyone, it has been a while since I submitted my original submission as a freshly starting medical student at the University of Birmingham in November 2020. A lot has happened since then, while feeling like nothing has happened at all. Semester one exams (Birmingham splits exams into two parts, instead of all modules at the end) went well, and I was happy with my results. I was quite disappointed with my first piece of reflective writing and the result I got from that, but it is all still a learning process and the most important thing to remember is a pass is a pass.

In my last instalment, I had quite a few pictures to share with you, including me going onto campus during fresher’s week. Since then, I can count on my hands how many times I have been on campus for teaching thanks to the Covid-10 pandemic. The bulk of this was for Basic Life Support training which I will talk more about later.

Starting semester two has been quite a whirlwind of emotions, everything moves extremely fast in medical school and you are thrusted into totally new topics quite suddenly. This term we are covering three scientific modules and one medical sociology module, like last term, as well as the continuous regional anatomy, professional and academic skills and community-based medicine (GP placements) module. For the scientific modules, we are covering Muscles, Joints and Movements (MJM), Introduction to Respiratory Medicine (IRM) and Digestive System (DIG) so definitely an interesting and challenging selection. Our medical sociology module this term is called Doctors, Patients and Society (DPS) and has so far consisted of a lot about the doctor-patient relationship, including a session where we had to role play through Zoom which was an interesting experience to say the least.

The reflective essay which we received results for with our January exams was part of the Professional and Academic Skills modules, and within this module, we also have group project and exam-based assessment coming up, both of which contribute to its score. For the Community-Based Medicine module, we are assessed once, and this is through a 2000-word essay about lifestyle changes. Essay writing at university is a shock to the system, as an A-grade A Level history student, it has taken me by surprised how different university-level academic writing is for a course like Medicine and the best tip I can provide you with is, do not get overly creative, instead read the marking rubric properly and hit the points they want you to hit. I have submitted this essay just before Easter and I hope it goes better than the reflective essay from before.

At the University of Birmingham, to pass our first year, we must learn some practical skills, mainly in the form of Basic Life Support training which focuses on CPR, recovery position, torniquets and choking. We do this through a fully accredited course ran by the Resuscitation Council. I live near Birmingham, so I was able to do this and passed first time. For those people who did not move back, because they were neither obliged to or if they are international students who were unable to due to Covid, they did an introduction to the course online and they will do the practical part as soon as they can return to campus which is not looking likely until September.

The workload has remained around the same, which is great because it is still a huge workload. I think the best way to end this is by saying that studying medicine is basically a full-time job, 40 hours of work per week including your lectures is quite normal and going into the course with that in mind is the best way to ensure you keep up with what lies ahead. Oh, and congratulations to everyone who has received an offer this year, I wish you the best of luck for results day!

First year is over!

With this final entry to my Pathway Profile, year one is over! I can’t believe just one year ago I was uncertain about where my future would take me with results day looming. It has been a tough road, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Now to get into the juicy part of any academic life, EXAMS. I was really scared about the thought of university exams, despite us doing half of them in January, it was still as nerve-wracking in May/June. You always hear about how tough they are, and the content often seems endless when you’re revising. Thankfully I passed with good scores, so my summer has been great so far. If you don’t pass you have the opportunity to resit/redo any exams/assignments.

Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, all our year oneGP placements in person were cancelled and we instead interviewed some patients through the NHS video appointment software to practice our history taking skills. Although a good use of our time, it wasn’t the same. However, thanks to my summer research studentship and placement (more about that later) I have managed to sit in on some clinics hosted by a consultant at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, they truly were fascinating, if not daunting with all the complex cases which you witness.

I’ve applied to be a mentor on the MDS pathway programme, so anyone coming into my university through widening participation criteria is assigned to a mentor like me. I was a mentee last year and found the mentoring relationship useful to smooth out any anxieties in the lead up to the start of term. I’m also extremely grateful for forming some great mentoring relationships with mentors, which honestly, I’ve realised now are some of the most valuable relationships you’ll form in your professional life.

As mentioned earlier, I’ve managed to secure a studentship. This is effectively funding for you to do some work over the summer. My studentship is worth £2000 so it has been a massive help in making the work I’m currently doing, which is endocrine research, possible. Research has always been something that interests me (I missed the Aston residential for a Nuffield research placement, sorry), but I wasn’t willing to sacrifice the patient interaction and management offered by medicine to pursue it through an academic human biology degree. However, I can now confidently say you can do both, even while at medical school! Now it wasn’t easy, and it involved countless emails to various professors and consultants to only receive a minimal number of replies, but I’m glad I did since I’m now on some very interesting projects with the possibility of getting published in the near future which is huge. I don’t want to bore you with the details of how organising opportunities like this works, but I’m sure I could pass on the information to the pathways staff if anyone requests.

Birmingham have said that they’re expecting in person teaching in September, and I’m really hoping it does materialise since it really isn’t the university experience you expect or want in the long term to be sitting in your room on Zoom all day, while watching pre-recorded lectures. However, of course this is subject to the pandemic remaining in control through September and beyond. I’m very excited for second year and to face what it has to offer.Hopefully some more in person teaching and patient contact. Then with that concluded, second year will be over in a blink like first and the pre-clinical side of medicine will be finished.

To sum this profile up, I thought it would be nice to mention what went well and what has been a challenge. Although, I don’t think it’s possible to generalise something like pursuing medicine like that. Everything will go well, and everything will be a challenge, you just need to stay focused and keep going. The support is there for you, and everyone wants you to succeed so just focus on yourself, help those around you and you really can’t go wrong.

Good luck to everyone picking up their A Level results soon and I hope you get the results you deserve!