#57

Just yesterday, I was thinking about why I need to come up with learning issues and find sources to write about it. Who knew we would have to do this someday when we were in clinical school? I had no idea. :S

I mean, when in Phase 1, we had to come up with at least 8 learning issues. The fewer the issues, the happier we were because that meant less work and that the session would end faster but thinking about it now, when we had a lot of time, it should have been used properly so that those sessions would end up sticking in our heads until Phase 2. If you ask me, I have not a clue about what I learnt. I might have a bit of basics but when it comes to molecular level, there is no way would I be able to recall lectures on differences between acute and chronic inflammation or perhaps the processes of cell formation and antibodies, process of inflammation etc.

Now, I find it taxing, but only to a certain extent because there are marks for it and there are lecturers who have a certain amount of expectations. I do not like writing learning issues because I am unable to find answers from journals to the question I have posed as an issue. It is not as simple as picking something off the internet like a newspaper article or from a forum discussion. Another reason is because of the time constraint and the amount of ideas that should be generated. Sure, we have 5 weeks to come up with 9 learning issues. 2 learning issues for 4 summaries and 1 for report. But what actually happens during a 5 week posting?

Week 1: Familiarising to a new posting. New schedule. New environment. New style of clerking. New techniques to learn. Basically, everything is NEW!

Week 2: Getting started. Well this should have been done in week 1 actually but it almost never happen unless the mind can be trained in a way to learn and cramp everything in advanced. So we start clerking in pairs. We make mistakes almost all the time. There would always be a piece of missing information.

Week 3: Getting the hang of it. So, this is the time when I would start looking for cases to write on and usually not very successful. This is also the time when I realise that it is rather difficult to look for suitable learning issues. This is the week where I learn to make issues out of things. :)

Week 4: Getting somewhere. This is the week when we are familiarised with the curriculum. I know I am heading somewhere. I know now what this posting is about. But, oh snap, exam is in week 5! This is the week when case summaries and reports should be finished but still, it doesn't happen. Mugging starts here.

Week 5: Exam time. Case summaries/report deadline. Stress.

This cycle repeated itself 3 times during this semester and I am about to go through it the 4th time. Lucky for me, some postings allow us to hand in our assignments on the Monday of a new posting and that would be tomorrow. I still have one more learning issue and one case formulation to complete. *Sigh*