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...