feeling like the end of term...

now that we've finished the majority of our course, this weekend has been surprisingly quiet for me! for the last 3 weeks of term we'll be starting our options courses, which i mentioned in a previous post. other than that this week has been pretty quiet, as things seem to have been winding down. i'm sure it'll be a very different story next weekend - always is!

i thought i'd use this post to point out a few important weblinks (that i particularly found useful) that might be worth checking out:


Journals:
- http://www.studentbmj.com/
- http://www.sciam.com/
- http://news.bbc.co.uk/ - health section!


Forums:
- http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/ - several cam medics on here
- http://www.medschoolguide.co.uk
- http://www.admissionsforum.co.uk/


Search engines:
- http://www.scirus.com/srsapp/


A-level (mainly Biology):
- http://www.cellsalive.com/toc.htm#function
- http://www.mrothery.co.uk/
- http://www.emc.maricopa.edu/faculty/farabee/BIOBK/BioBookTOC.html
- http://w3.dwm.ks.edu.tw/bio/activelearner/submenus/part7index.html


... and if you're ever bored, this is interesting: http://www.shartwell.freeserve.co.uk/humor-site/medical-acronyms.htm... enjoy!

options and decisions!

hi guys,

this week's been pretty easy going, because we're nearing the end of our main 3 courses - in 2 weeks time we'll start doing our option courses which should hopefully be easier going! i've chosen to do 'use and abuse of janus drugs' (which is basically the pharmacology, sociology and neuroscience behind taking addictive drugs for the most part), and 'man, molecules and the environment' which is also pharmacology-related, but more to do with the importance of testing drugs, and the effects that products we use have on the environment i.e. pollution. unfortunately MME has a few 3-hr practicals in the afternoons, which i just found out about, so am not so overly keen about it!! either way the options courses are designed to give you an insight into an area of medicine that interests you - i generally chose the more straightforward ones, as i think i'm not too keen to take on something interesting, but hard!

the other options that others are doing include developmental biology (which is all really interesting stuff about how you develop and polarise vision, how nerves regenerate, etc which i remember being really difficult to remember), sensorimotor neurobiology, infectious diseases, clinically applied physiology, experimental psychology and tumour biology. a lot of those are really interesting topics, but i think are harder conceptually, especially when it comes to cramming before the exams!! anyway, once i start my options i can let you know how good/bad my choices were!!

next year is a completely different story. at cambridge the 'tripos' system operates on the basis that in the first to years (parts 1A and 1B) you study the core medical sciences, but in the 3rd year (part 2) you basically do whatever you want in terms of subject!! part 2 is a chance for you to really get to grips with something that interests you, and conduct research projects / dissertations, which count towards you cambridge BA (don't ask me why we get an bachelor of arts for a science subject!)... the problem is, i have NO idea what i want to do!! most people choose 'sciencey' options, that generally help especially if you're applying to stay on in cambridge. others though have done subjects like management sciences, law, english and even italian! it's completely up to you what you want to do!

i just got back from a mayball committee meeting, and i need to sort out some admin stuff, so i'll type again in a week's time to keep you guys up to scratch with my life!

kief :)

oops, accidentally clicked enter when i was typing! here's the rest of the blog for sat 12th feb...

repro:
we've finished all the horrible embrylogy stuff on how the egg develops, etc, and now we're moving on to more obs/gynae related clinical stuff like the maternal changes during pregnancy, which is way more interesting!

all-in-all work's not too bad, but i've still got some pharmokinetics supervision questions to do so i better get back to it!

i'll b bk in a week!

K

hey blog-readers...

another week seems to have whooshed by... i really need to stop saying that! only got one more '6-day' week after which no more sat morning lectures! i thought it might be a good idea this time to run through what i've currently doing in each subject:

neuro:
at the moment we're doing the neuropsychology component of the course. it's really interesting, but to some extent it's more about understanding key concepts rather than rote fact learning (as the cam course seems to be labelled as being!)... we've covered neurobiology of emotion, and common psychiatric disorders like depression, anxiety and schizophrenia, which were all really interesting to learn about (though by the end of it all i was convinced that i was a paranoid, depressed schizophrenic)! this week we did some work on the neural basis of learning, cognition and memory, and revisited areas of the brain we covered last term (seems SO long ago!) like the hippocampus, etc (you'll all do this at some point!)

pathology:
we've finished bacteriology (no more sniffing bacteria!) and we're now doing cancer. the lectures are pretty interesting, and to some extent we've covered a lot of the stuff last year in biochemistry (esp stuff on the molecular basis of cancer i.e. how cell signalling pathways cause cancer), so a lot of the new stuff we're doing now is more clinical, like identifying the different types of cancer, and how they spread, etc. the practicals are really well taught (pathology's one of the best organised depts in cam) but even then it can get a bit tedious looking down a microscope trying to work out which cells are cancerous and what type of cancer they are! in the exam we'll have to also redraw what we see down the microscope, and compile a mini-report... i can't really see myself doing amazingly well here...

pharmacology:
having completed pharmacokinetics (which was pretty much all equations!) we're now doing chemotherapy, which links in nicely with path. the big problem though is the sheer volume of drug names... last term most of the drug names were easy to learn because we'd heard of them before e.g. aspirin, heparin (in cardiovascular pharmacology). in chemotherapy, they've all got mental names depending on whether they're antiviral, antibacterial or anticancer! at the end of the day pharm is one of those subjects where you just have to learn the material, rather than understand any particularly difficult concepts.

another manic week sails by!

hey guys,

this last week seems to have whooshed by... it really is amazing when you sit down and think about how much work you actually cover during a week, and how quickly you move on to new topics! anyway, here's a brief summary of what i've been upto this week:

monday was pretty uneventful, but had a friends 21st birthday formal at peterhouse which was cool... though peterhouse may have the prestige of being the oldest college in cambridge, it's formals definitely haven't got much to show! the food was pretty weird - being a veggie, i had a really weird sweet 'n' sour main meal, which was more like soup than a proper dish... lol - the dessert was also a bit weird (but you get used to it when it comes to formals), but i somehow managed...

wednesday was a completely different story. again i had formal, but this was a scholar's one, so they gave a free drinks reception beforehand, followed by an awesome meal (which was very similar to the matriculation dinner, which the first formal hall dinner you are given in cambridge)... i still remember that - i actually wore a black tie thinking that that was what 'black-tie' meant - in fact it wasn't even black tie - only 'lounge suits'! oh well i guess that shows how little i know about formalities!

anyway returning to the scholar's dinner - like i said the food was pretty good, and they even gave some robinson college mints (cool i know!)... however we did have a really random after-dinner speech on carbon emissions by a professor of thermodynamics... don't really think i need to expand on that further!

thursday was pretty uneventful, but yet again things stepped up last night because we had our mayball launch formal... three formals in one week!! no wonder i got minimal work done this week!!

speaking of work i've got a path essay, pharmacology practical question and neuro essay plan to do (all be it for two weeks time, but hey)!

better get back to it, will write another post soon!

kief :)