It’s nearly\u00a0been two weeks since I officially traded my dusky black Cambridge\u00a0college gown for the shiny,\u00a0new\u00a0white coat of the London hospitals.<\/p>\n
Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, really.<\/p>\n
My\u00a0undergraduate gown is still with me, and I didn’t get any white coat (in fact, British doctors have long discarded the white coat tradition).<\/p>\n
I’ve now started my clinical course at Barts and The London Medical School, and although I’ve finished three years in Cambridge, I’m technically a 3rd year at Barts, since the Cambridge\u00a0Part II year doesn’t count towards my medical degree proper. Things have been going *relatively*\u00a0smoothly since I shifted into the student halls on September 3rd.<\/p>\n
The area which I’m living in, Barbican, is a picture of geniality of its Victorian past, most notably that of the\u00a0West Smithfield meat market,\u00a0coupled with visible signs of modernism, as exemplified by the giant gray\u00a0behemoth that is the Barbican Centre. Not too far from my hall is\u00a0St Bartholomew’s Hospital (affectionately known as St Barts), which\u00a0dates back to 1123 – making it supposedly the oldest hospital in existence in England. This is one of the two major teaching hospitals that make up Barts & The London\u00a0Medical\u00a0School, the other one being The Royal London Hopsital (most of the time, simply referred to as\u00a0The London) in Whitechapel. Whitechapel is, for the want of a better word,\u00a0referred to as the ‘culturally-vibrant’\u00a0heart\u00a0of East London –\u00a0quite simply, an euphimism to describe the plethora of (mostly) South Asian community that populate that quarter of the city.\u00a0Not surprisingly,\u00a0we get a good mix of patients.<\/p>\n
David stays opposite my room. Both our neighbours are ex-Oxonians. And\u00a0our neighbour’s\u00a0neighbours\u00a0were from St Andrew’s.\u00a0Interestingly enough, there’s also\u00a0another ex-Cantabridgian\u00a0living along our corridor who shares the same first name as David. (and oddly enough, we seem not to have a problem with differentiating the both of them). Call it a coincident if you want to, but I strongly suspect that this is a ploy by the higher-ups to lump all the direct clinical entry students (or ‘transfer students’, as they call us) in the same place. Possibly to avoid us integrating with the other Barts students? My suspicions were further confirmed when I found out that ALL the transfer students who had applied for student accomodation were indeed placed in the SAME student hall.<\/p>\n
Academic-wise (you saw that coming didn’t you?), it’s a steep learning curve.\u00a0That’s as much as I can say at this juncture, since it’s too early to judge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s nearly\u00a0been two weeks since I officially traded my dusky black Cambridge\u00a0college gown for the shiny,\u00a0new\u00a0white coat of the London hospitals. Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, really. My\u00a0undergraduate gown is still with me, and I didn’t get any white coat (in fact, British doctors have long discarded the white coat tradition). I’ve now […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":491,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1232],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-life"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shenhanlee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shenhanlee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shenhanlee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shenhanlee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/491"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shenhanlee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shenhanlee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shenhanlee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shenhanlee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shenhanlee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}