 What is up guys Karma Medic here and welcome back to another dose. If you're new to the channel hi my name is Nasser and I'm now a third year medical student at Kings College London and for each year that I've been in medical school I sit down and do one of these videos to show you guys what it's like to be a medical student in that specific year. So now that I'm in my third year we finish the theory based part of learning in medical school and we spend most of our times in the hospital on the wards and talking to actual patients. So I want to give you guys a day by day breakdown of what medical school is like here in the UK is that if you're thinking of applying you know exactly what it is that you're getting into. I'd love to hear from you in a comment down below where it is that you study medicine and if you're not in medical school what medical school you're thinking of applying to. We have lectures every couple of months for one or two weeks and then the rest of the time we spend the vast majority of it in the hospital on the wards talking to real patients. Alright so let's start off with Monday. So we start the week off pretty strong with a full day of clinical placement. Currently I'm on the vascular block which means we start teaching at 8.30 in the morning. We either have a lecture or small group teaching based on things that we're likely going to see in the wards over the coming weeks. So for example we could be learning how to perform a cardiovascular exam, how to do a peripheral limb exam or how to properly interpret an ECG. After the morning teaching on clinical placement we're always assigned to a morning activity and an afternoon activity. So this ranges from a whole bunch of different things depending on what block you're doing but for me right now on the vascular block this could be something like sitting in the cath lab watching angiograms or angioplasties or we could be doing ward rounds with a consultant going from patient to patient trying to figure out what their current case is, how best to treat them and manage them, how they're getting along with their recovery etc and typically during these activities you would mostly be observing unless you take initiative and you really make an effort to get yourself involved. So for example if we're on ward rounds I'll talk to the F1 to see if there are any interesting patients that I can go take a history from and then I'll go talk to that patient try and understand why it is that they're in the hospital take a full medical history from them and then report back either to the F1 or a registrar or a consultant whoever's available to me and has a little bit of time. That way I learn as much as possible when I'm on the wards and I can practice my patient history taking my S bar or handing over of patient information and all kinds of other skills that I'll need to learn as a doctor. If I'm going to be observing surgery for the day I ask if I can scrub in so that I can help in any way shape or form that I can during the procedure. I don't think there's anything more exciting than being able to actually touch the patient hold different tools and help in the surgical procedure in any way no matter how small. So that's Mondays they're long and heavy clinical days and usually after a full day of clinical placement I'm quite tired I'm quite exhausted so in the evening I usually just do some editing for this YouTube channel or I go over to my friend's house to have some dinner watch something and relax. It's usually quite a calm evening and I don't get much studying done on my clinical placement days which takes us on to Tuesdays which are full days dedicated to our scholarly project. So in our third year each KCL medical student is assigned to a scholarly project. Now most of these projects are clinically focused but they could be in the humanities as well. Usually what these projects will involve is students doing a series of lectures or small group teaching in order to learn about a very niche or specialized topic and then at the end of the module you'll have to write up an essay or a research paper as your assignment and then there are some projects like the one that I'm doing which is a full on research project. So research projects are basically when you have a question and then you go out and perform experiments in the lab or you collect data in a clinical setting in order to try and answer that question. After that you write a full research paper talking about the methods the data you collected what you found in that data and what wider impact your research and your data will have. That paper then gets submitted to a journal and with a little bit of luck and your fingers crossed it gets published. So currently I am doing a full research project in pediatrics more specifically about gastrostomies. I won't bore you with the details here I've talked about it extensively in another video which you can click on and watch here but as you can imagine a project like this takes up quite a lot of time. Usually what this means for me is I go to the hospital with my research partner and we sit down at a computer and collect data from nine till five. It's a bit tedious and honestly quite boring collecting that much patient data for that long but I know that this paper is going to have an important impact and the data that we're collecting is very valuable so I'm pushing through. Now let's move on to Wednesday. Ah Wednesday. Wednesday is probably my favorite day of the week. Wednesdays are the only day in third year of medical school at Kings College London where we don't specifically have something assigned we don't have a task or an activity planned for us. Wednesdays are what in medical school we call independent learning time or self-study time or whatever you want to call it. So basically Wednesdays are free which is great until you remember that there's no such thing as free time in medical school. Wednesdays are days that I can actually dedicate to sitting down in the library and learning the lecture material that I have to know for my upcoming exams. On top of that it's a day where I can think about all the different things that I saw on clinical placement and start learning those as well. It's been kind of difficult this year because having only one day a week in order to review your lectures and prepare for upcoming exams also practice your clinical skills etc it's not that much time. It makes time management and studying smart even more important and I have a bunch of videos on that you guys can check them out somewhere over here. So that's Wednesdays basically a full day of catching up on lectures and making sure that I'm actually learning what it is that I see when I'm on clinical placement. Wednesday evenings are a good time for me to also relax and unwind a little bit hang out with my friends do something that I enjoy and just chill. And before we move on to Thursday I want to give a quick shout out to the sponsor of today's video Skillshare. Skillshare as I'm sure you already know is an online learning community with thousands of classes covering everything from design to creativity to entrepreneurial skills. Skillshare is really affordable at just $10 a month for its annual subscription giving you access to all of its classes. Like I've said in the past I've personally used Skillshare in order to improve the editing of videos like this and also to learn more about YouTube like the search engine optimization and the YouTube algorithm. Whether you want to learn a new skill or explore your more creative side Skillshare is the perfect place to do just that. And because Skillshare is sponsoring this video you guys can click on the links in the description down below and get two free months off of the premium membership. So thank you to Skillshare for sponsoring this video and now let's talk about Thursdays in my third year of medical school. Now Thursdays are fairly similar to Monday it's again another day in the hospital another day of full clinical placement starting at 8 30 in the morning and finishing at 5 p.m. So here again we rotate through even more clinical activities hopefully talk to more patients and learn more about this amazing subject that we call medicine. Thursday evenings are the evenings that I look forward to the most for the entire week because it's when I play basketball. Playing basketball is my favorite way to do some exercise expend my energy and just relieve all the stress out of my body in a physical way. I make sure to play every single Thursday and I play on Tuesdays sometimes as well because I know how important it is to balance my academic life with things that I enjoy outside of medical school. And that brings us on to Fridays which are completely different and something totally new as third year medical students. On Fridays we have clinical placement again but now instead of it being in a clinical hospital it's in a psychiatric hospital. So these are hospitals that are dedicated to patients who have mental health disorders and this can range from anything like eating disorders for example anorexia and bulimia to personality disorders to schizophrenia. Now I find this mental health placement particularly interesting. There's something about being physically ill that you can wrap your head around. You can almost touch it. For most diseases that we see on the ward you almost know exactly what is wrong with that patient. They have some sort of underlying pathology in an organ or perhaps even at the molecular level but we kind of know what's going wrong and why they are ill. But with mental health it's much more intangible. You can't quite point to something and say this is why this person has OCD or depression or is having auditory hallucinations or whatever the case may be. I find this placement really interesting because I feel like there's so much more for me to learn in terms of how to talk to patients, how to ask them the correct questions, how to take a full psychiatric history. There's just so much going on and so much for me to learn. So Fridays are one week on and one week off between what I just told you and then a mental health reflection week. So what the teaching involves is a one-hour lecture talking about something in the mental health field. For example how to take a mental state exam, how to take psychiatric history, how to look for different signs of different mental health disorders and then that is followed up with a balance group. So balance groups are an opportunity for students to talk about patients or cases that they've seen which have left an impact on them and it's supposed to make us more reflective and think about the different problems that patients might face from a patient perspective as opposed to a doctor's perspective like we will be in the future or other healthcare professionals perspectives. Finally that takes us over to the weekend so Saturday and Sunday. So the weekends can be busy depending on what time of year it is. Obviously around exam time I'm taking every opportunity that I can in order to study but usually throughout the year I use the weekends to take a little bit of a break from the hectic schedule that medical school is. Of course if I have any upcoming lectures or patient educator sessions that I need to prepare for then the weekend is a really good time for that because I have time and I'm not really that pressured. I also spend a good chunk of my weekends editing youtube videos like this because uploading weekly content definitely takes up quite a lot of time. I try my best to relax by hanging out with friends or playing video games with my sister or whatever it is that I can do to enjoy myself and that's pretty much it just making sure that you have a good balance between your academic life and studying for medical school and then also just working on yourself growing as a person doing things that you enjoy as a human being outside of medicine. Okay and I think that pretty much wraps up my review of being a third year medical student at a UK medical school. I hope you guys have gotten a pretty good insight into my life and have enjoyed this video. If you did enjoy this video please do leave a like on it leave me a comment down below and subscribe to the channel to see more content from me in the future. It will be really interesting to look back on this video when I'm a doctor and think about just how different my life was as a third year medical student. I hope you guys learned something and I hope you enjoyed this video and I will see you in the next one. Peace!