Year 2 So Far

Everyone told us when we started that year 2 would be the hardest of our degree - and that may be true, but so far I'm loving it! Sure, it's a lot of work, with a lot expected of us and more "teach yourself medicine" than ever, but this year is much more clinically-based. One of our major assessment pieces is a portfolio we have to submit, full of long and short cases. A lot of students whinge about it, and then make up their long cases (or copy them from each other), but I really enjoy going to the wards and meeting patients - getting the chance to really talk to them and find out their story, and hopefully hear a cool murmur or something like that along the way. Doing long cases seems to be the closest we get to actually doing medicine at this stage, so I just can't understand why people who want to be doctors would pass up that opportunity!

One of the trickier things with the more academic-based part of year 2 is knowing what to learn. Now that we are focussing a bit more on the clinical aspect of things, there just seems to be so much detail you could potentially go into! I just don't know how much we should know about the 34 different types of lymphoma from last week. To go to one layer of knowledge seems all too easy, while the next seems impossibly difficult - why can't I find the happy medium? This week is a bit the same - our case is malaria, but the broad theme for the week is tropical and travel medicine, which potentially could cover just about anything! We must have covered more than 20 diseases in our lectures this morning alone. A bit of guidance would be great right about now...