Trips, New Jobs and the UKCAT

I started this blog yesterday, but apparently I'm unable to start a blog without stopping midway through!

'Let me set the scene on what im doing right now - Firstly I'm alone. It's a sunny Thursday afternoon and im sat in a Starbucks in Reading with a vanilla latte in hand and an apple fritter doughnut. Im meant to be on a health kick, but apparently I have no self control when starbucks is concerned. Two days from now I'll be boarding a flight to Bangkok, which in itself is exciting. I'm going to be in Chiang Mai, undertaking various hospital placements and I guess I'm looking forward to it, even if I'm incredibly nervous. But right now I want to look back. 5 days ago, I started a new job, and it was really enjoyable, but opened my eyes to how much i still need to learn. It also involved a lot of patient contact and far more medication and treatment than I could have ever dreamt of seeing with the Red Cross. It's made me see how far I actually want to advance in my skills as a first aider, naturally, but its also cemented how much I actually want to do clinical work. When I started my biomedical science degree, a lot of people said to me that I'd like it so much, I wouldn't want to continue perusing medicine afterwards, and I can see why a lot of people feel that way. There are a lot of attractive career prospects  that come with doing a degree like mine, and ones that I don't doubt for a moment I would get great satisfaction from, but my heart definitely lies with medicine. 

Let's now go back to this morning. I sat in a room, surrounded by people clutching their green licences and counterparts. Now I'd be lying if I said that it didn't entertain me considerably sitting there with my pink photo card, but that's irrelevant. I went back to a room I'd been in almost 4 years ago, but for an entirely different purpose. So if you've read my previous posts on my blog, you'd know that I have a lot of work to do in terms of my exam strategy, as in if I can do it without going slightly crazy, I consider it a win! So naturally I was nervous. And then I got into the exam room. The UKCAT screen was in front of me, and I looked at the questions which were an entirely different format for the verbal reasoning from the practice ones in the books I bought. I then got onto the quantitative analysis section and my time keeping was just terrible. I mean worse than I've ever had in any exam before. I missed out 13 questions. So by this point I was contemplating univerrsities that didn't require the UKCAT. then it got onto the abstract reasoning section. I've always been good at this one, so this helped to relax me a little. I then got onto the decision analysis. When I started practicing questions back in June, this was my nemesis. But I'd practiced the question format so much, and after relaxing a little during the previous section, I went through this really calmly, and finished the section 5 minutes before the time was up. This actually turned out to be my best section, and I achieved a near perfect score on it. 

Anyway I ended up averaging 750, which is good in terms of getting into medical school, but not quite as good as my practice tests, which I attribute to the lack of finishing the quantitative analysis section, however this is another 'green light' to continue my application to medical school this month, so I'm relatively happy about it! '

Now to embark on my next adventure! Expect lots of posts

XOX