What do you do?
I am a MBBS (this stands for a bachelor of medicine; bachelor of surgery) at St George's Medical School in London.
Training to be a doctor usually takes between five and six years, but I am in the first year of a faster four year 'accelerated' course designed for people who already have a degree.
There are about seventy students in our year; a great mix of interesting people from all sorts of backgrounds with ages ranging from early twenties to late thirties. We are taught with quite a new tutorial-based system that was pioneered in Australia called PBL ('Problem Based Learning').
Instead of the more traditional, topic based, structured teaching - with, say, 300 people in a lecture hall - we are divided into tutorial groups of about seven people, and the emphasis is on quite a lot of self study.
The course proceeds in modules: we started last September with the immune system, and have moved through reproduction and babies, heart and lungs, stomach and liver, and this month we are looking at muscles and bones.
It's an intense course, requiring a lot of stamina and determination. But I really enjoy what I'm doing. I know I definitely made the right decision in choosing medicine.
