Youre dreaming of the days when you dont have exams and can afford to watch a movie and have a drink or three on the Friday. Its not too far away for some of you!

The trainee intern year is easily the best one at medical school – you get to experience taking care of patients before some real responsibility is thrust upon you and – get paid in the process! Not to mention taking some time off to do your elective.

Here are some of the things i thought about as the year progressed. this is part 1 of what i shouldve known in 5th year. IN the next blog, i shall attempt to take you through each rotation and what to watch out for during your final year of medical school

Really. there are only 4 things to make sure you nail in the TI year

1. Gen Med Long case

2. Psyc OSCE

3. EMPLOYMENT : for which you need to choose your hospital wisely and get appropriate references in time , do your due diligence and have a strong application.

4.  in light of the above – choose your rotations wisely

i lie. There are five things. Heres the 5th

5. ELECTIVE – make doubly sure youre going to enjoy yourself wherever you go!

sometime towards the end of 5th year, when  i was sweating bullets over the impending osce and the  finals, i was to make a choice of rotations. Rather fortuitously for me – (and i hope it helps some of you 5th yrs to make choices)

The TI year panned out thus

1. 1st Quarter elective plus holiday November -February

2. Radiology week + Surgery 7 weeks - Mar – Apr (MINI CEX in Surgery)

3.  Gen Medicine  6 weeks- May- Jun (the all important LONG CASE)

4. Psychiatry – 4 weeks – Jun – July ( PSYC OSCE)

—– it is about this time when ACE applications are due for employment—

5. GP – 4 weeks July – August

6. Obs/Gyn Sept – Oct

7. Paeds – November

8. Start first job end of November!

The rationale for this choice was simple

I wanted a break – an extended one if possible after 5th year exams , so by choosing the elective in the first quarter, id ensure that i spent 10 weeks doing the elective and the rest of the time chillaxing.

Doing surgery next was intuitive, because thats what id have done on my elective and it would be nice to get a good reference from the consultant surgeon if i wanted to be employed. The plan was to try and get exposure to as much “medical management” of surgical patients as possible to hold me in good stead for the upcoming gen med long case.

My Medical rotation would be in the middle of the year. This would give me enough time to get back into clinical medicine and ensure i had a decent shot at doing well in the Long Case – (so it wasnt too early or too late in the year – peaking at the right time) .

And personally i think,  how one does in the long case is a reflection of their clinical ability. To be able to sort out a patients problems in 40 minutes and come up with a management plan is the best simulation of real world medicine!

in other words, if you do well in the long case, and PUT IT IN YOUR CV, it potentially provides employers a quick but nearly always reliable overview of your clinical acumen and application. Its somewhat more convincing than a paragraph outlining how you have good people skills and that you like helping people. To me anyway.

After the long case, its about trying to find as many references as possible to strengthen your application to  the hospital of your choice. Think carefully, You need 3 references, so its wise to start getting them in the 5th year and choose your best ones, and try get them from consultants who have some influence in the hospital you work at – advisable but not entirely necessary.

Remember – you cant get a reference unless youve done a rotation – and so if you think your strongest chances  for a good reference lie in Gen Med/Surg/whatever – it pays to do them before the employee match!

More on the CV in the next blog.

The psyc osce is a relatively hard – because you are expected to know a lot more than you would think – the cross examination while being video-ed is daunting to some. But thanks to some excellent tutorials and practice vids – its manageable.

The rest of the year was intended to be a breeze . GP, Obs/Gyn and Paeds are all rotations that i thought werent terribly different to 5th year at all.

What happened during the TI year and how did i face it? What can i suggest to make the transition from TI to house officer

More in the next blog!