Today was the last day of class
For this year at least, classes are over. I am a little uncertain if we will be having regular classes next year or not. I think it will depend on the rotation. There are five main divisions next year, Rural Medicine, Surgery, Mental Health, General Practice, and Medicine. I think they will all run a little differently, and have heard rumours of PBLs next year as well, but run on one day instead of two (separated by study on the topic) and that there might be days or half days of lecture next year.
Anyway, it’s a little sad to realize that the student life as it is formally recognized has come to a close for this campus, right when I started to feel like I knew what was going on. I am really excited about next year though. It will be a lot of learning as it is a paradigm shift moving into the hospitals on a full time basis, but I’m looking forward to it. Now I just need to get through these next exams. I have three rounds of assessment coming up, called the MSAT, PSA2.1 and PSA 2.2 respectively. The MSAT is a Multi-Station Assessment Task, which is a live exam of five different stations, as the name suggests. There are: Clinical Reasoning, Examination, History Taking, Ethics and Advanced Life Support stations. The idea of this exam scares me, as I feel as though there’s nowhere to hide. Just you and the examiner. And the patients I guess… they usually are actors at this stage, but some might be patient-actors with real signs. This test is on November 8 for me.
Then on the 10th and 11th I have two more exams, the first being PSA2.1 (Progressive Summative Assessment) which is based on material from this last semester. Then the next day is based on all material covered up until now.
Then my plans are to recover a little from the exam, clean up and go check out the Sunshine Coast, as that is where I will be living next year, and then I’m headed to New Zealand for 10 days. I will be home in the beginnning of December. I am looking forward to being home very much.