A Vision of Revision

I've spent this weekend camped in a lecture theatre at a finals lecture course, not only that, I paid for the privilege. At £95 a weekend, its not cheap, especially when there is one for surgery and one for medicine. I guess whether or not they're worth it is a personal opinion, perhaps sitting at home reading a book would be just as effective and £95 cheaper for some people. A few thousand students each year attend one of the finals revision courses run by companies like the MDU so there must be something about them that makes them popular, perhaps its the misguided vision that attending such a course is a one-way ticket to finals success. I'm not as naive to think that and if anything this weekend has made me more scared than I was before.

You do get comprehensive notes but its a bloody expensive text-book! The lecturer, who was a most charismatic surgeon from Imperial, must do rather well financially out of the weekends although he does have to give up 5 or 6 weekends each year in order to lecture around the country. He didn't strike me as someone who was doing it for the money, he seemed passionate about teaching which is perhaps what made it so good, he also seemed like quiet the high flyer and had accomplished rather a lot for his modest age. He was adamant that it shouldn't be just a session about finals and paid more attention to things which will be useful if we actually get through finals to our foundation years. His lecturing style was very clear and concise with the occasional humorous anecdote to keep us all awake. He did well, lecturing by himself, to keep my attention for 2 whole days. It was odd being back in a lecture theatre having not had a proper lecture for almost 3 years (not that we had many lectures before that). There were a number of comments from the audience, made up of students from various Northern medical schools, about a percieved lack of knowledge. Without saying it explicitly, the lecturer was rather critical of some of the modern medical education methods, there was no shortage of students who agreed with him either. Many students, and not just from my medical school, are worried about serious deficiencies in their knowledge. I imagine medical students have always been worried about how much they know as they approach the end of the course and I suppose you might say its as much the students fault as the universities - but is it though? Not in my opinion, I recognise the importance of self-motivated learning, but there is a different between being self-motivated and having to teach yourself EVERYTHING! I could sit here and rant about things as I've done so in the past, but I won't, I'll leave it there but I really wished I'd been lectured to a little more in the last 5 years!

It is no wonder such intensive revision courses are so popular with a promise to prepare you for finals and personally I think it was worth every penny. I've learnt a lot and revised a lot over the last couple of days. Admittedly I missed my lie-in and doing physiology on a Sunday morning is not something that I particularly enjoy. One of the things I've realised is that there are more important things than finals, what about when we actually become doctors? It isn't going to matter who knows about Landau Kleffner syndrome, its going to matter who can actually deal with patients and who is competent.