[update] First day of medical school

Today was my first day doing Medicine at Melbourne Medical School. It was quite a new experience with the medical course, because the format of material given is not the same as undergrad. I had an experience with CSL (case supported learning) today too, which was interesting.

There were quite a few indemnity insurance companies also which were represented today, and I joined one of them because it was free for students. I hope I never need to rely on them though, but mistakes do happen in medicine.

It was nice to see some of the same faces in medicine as from Biomedicine at Melbourne, as well as a considerable number of new faces. This is probably the first time that I've known so many people in my next stage of study studying the same course as me, because not many people from my primary school went to my secondary college, and not many people from my secondary college went to my uni, and only one other person in my year went into the same course as me. The majority or plurality of people from my secondary college who went to uni went to Monash.

There were quite a few lectures today about housekeeping issues. Some of it was interesting, and some less so. Maybe it would be more interesting or engaging if I didn't have to spend all that time learning this professionalism or "what makes a good doctor" stuff to say during the interviews.

What I liked about today was the commitment that the coordinators of CSL at Melbourne seemed to give about upholding a high standard for the basic science given, so that we know what is happening within the patient at a deep level. Because we only have one preclinical year at Melbourne, I was wondering if they would cut out a lot of the stuff. By looking at the notes of the curriculum development before today, it seems like they tried not to cut out stuff, by making anatomy, physiology and biochemistry prerequisites, and integrating some of the remaining biological science teaching to be taught in clinical years, but it still seems like a major task fitting a lot of things that most other graduate entry medical courses fit in two years in just one year.

I hope they've done it well. It would be a shame if Melbourne stopped their long tradition of upholding a rigorous treatment of their medical course and basic sciences, which they started from the beginning of their medical program's existence 150 years ago with a five year undergraduate program instead of a four year undergraduate program which was predominant at the time, and with Melbourne graduates having the highest first sitting pass rates of the Basic Sciences Examination of the RACS (Royal Australasian College of Surgeons) as recently as the mid-2000s.

(For the record, during this period, USyd had the lowest pass rate in that exam due in a large part to their low emphasis of anatomy in their original graduate entry medical program, although this was recently resolved with a trebling of hours devoted to learning gross anatomy after their review in 2007.)

Anyway, I will be having my first clinical visit tomorrow. I'm lucky that my clinical visit for tomorrow isn't too far away, given that some people have clinical visits some distance away at the other side of the city to where they live.