Medical Students

Cardiff University has a new publication dedicated to healthcare students to join the student newspaper gair rhydd and magazine Quench in our successful little student media world.

Parklife is to be printed every two months and the March edition features piece written by yours truly, dedicated to 'my medics' who I've had the pleasure of living with for the last few years.

Here it is for those of you who dont have access to the facilities at the school of medicine:

Medics verses Non-Medics
I’m quite fond of medical students.

Words such as ‘cliquey’ can be banded around the outside world when talking about medics, but having lived with two for the last four years I can’t say that I’ve found this to be the case at all. They do, however, seem to come from another planet. Before I’m lynched, let me explain...

1. The acronyms. I imagine that this is the main reason that there’s any kind of perceived distance between medics and non-medics. There’s no chance of ‘us’ keeping up with ‘them’ if they insist on speaking gobbledygook. I get around it these days by making sure I’m only talking to one of them at once. The last time I made a cuppa for both of my medics the conversation was “NSTEMI, Lap and dye, BCC, HCOM,” Seriously, WTF?

2. Medics drink us under the table and live in the Live Lounge. In a few years from now I wouldn’t be surprised if stethoscopes came readymade with a built in wine glass.

3. If you sustain a minor injury, medics will talk about it using long words, leaving you with the feeling that they know something you don’t. This is probably what leaves people with Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia (fear of long words) to Iatrophobia (fear of medics).

4. I feel stupid watching medical programmes with them on telly. My Mum, who’s a nurse, used to do it watching Casualty and Holby City, a friend who is now in her final year of medicine used to do it to ER on the school bus and now my housemates do it whilst we’re watching Scrubs. I really don’t care if in reality ‘he’d be dead by now’ or ‘it actually looks more like ’ to you, I just want to relax in front of the TV! The final straw came whilst watching Glee earlier in the month when a medic friend started a conversation by referring to “the woman with exopthalmos”. I’ve come to the conclusion that medics shouldn’t be allowed televisions. End of.

There are some things I’m envious of though; medics tend to have some idea of a career path for post-graduation, they get five years at university rather than the majority of us who are unemployed after only three and they don’t seem to be a bad lot really. Nevertheless, biology students are better...

14 March 2010

Dissertation and coursework have been forcing me to work of late, so I haven't had a chance to write anything worth reading. Rather than post something nonsensical and tired I've decided to share a poem that I found today. Full credit goes to the poet, Robert Frost.

The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robin Stalking

Whilst standing in the centre of Gabalfa Roundabout at 01:30 am, in the freezing cold, waiting to hear if an insomniac blue tit would respond to our bird-impersonating calls, I momentarily envied humanities students. Actually, I envied anyone on the planet who was tucked up in bed, sat in a pub, drinking tea, or doing anything slightly sane or warm.

The thirteen other people, standing silently whilst listening to pre-recorded blackbird sounds, looked like they might be thinking similar things at Cosmeston Lakes two hours later.

We weren't completely bonkers though, we were testing out the perfectly reasonable idea that some birds will respond to simulated intruders in their territory, even at night-time. Some researchers (Fuller et al., 2007, spring to mind) have looked into the possibility that noise pollution in the daytime is causing robins to sing at night. There's also the possibility that street lighting in urban areas confuses their body clocks.

We tested out a few things to see if four species of songbird were more or less likely to sing at night in different areas, with various degrees of light and noise pollution. It looks like robins and blackbids are quite prepared to sing at night, whilst great tits and blue tits are somewhat reluctant to wake up from a good night's kip. The light pollution verses noise pollution debate still rumbles on and is causing one of my current coursework headaches.

Insights into animal behaviour aside, the 'moment of the evening' was at approximately half past midnight, outside The Woodville pub. Fourteen people were silently stood, dressed in woolly hats and welly boots, in a circle, with red-light head torches focussed on an enormous megaphone-shaped speaker playing bird noises at quite a loud volume. We were already feeling quite conscious of strange looks from passers-by, but it was impossible not to break the silence with a giggle when a group of students returning from the pub stopped to ask our lecturer if we were performing a ritual as part of a satanic cult.

For the record: We weren't.