What kind of student was I? Welllll, I think I've avoided posting here thus far because reminiscing makes me cringe slightly. I know it's virtually impossible to believe, but I wasn't always the effortlessly urbane confection you see before you on Barbelith.
*cough*
Erm, no. I managed to combine laziness, anxiety and 'squareness' into one unappealling package. I made the classic Scottish mistake of applying to the local university, on the grounds that living at home would be a fabulous idea in terms of saving money and preserving creature comforts. It kind of was, but it quickly became obvious that living a bus ride away from the city where I went to Uni left me high and dry when it came to the whole social aspect of things. I made a half-hearted attempt to go along to various events in fresher's week, but soon realised that, in continuing to live at home, I'd shot myself in the foot. Well can I remember the night I reenacted How Soon Is Now (with the additional indignity of a long, sick-drunk bus journey home before I could settle down to cry and want to die).
Luckily, I'd entered the local bursary competition and won an award which entitled me to a place in halls of residence, even if I lived within the catchment area. In second year, following a somewhat inevitable row with my mother, I did the teenage storming out thing, applied for a place and promptly moved into student accommodation. Much better, but I was always conscious of having missed out on the crucial social bonding thing of the first year. Always felt I was playing catch-up.
Medicine's a bit different from other courses, in that it's five years long, increasingly intensive and increasingly insular. Where I went to Uni, medics were geographically separate from other students from third year onwards, and it was much harder to do the traditional bunking off thing. I still managed to spend entire 24-hour blocks in bed, missing dissection, lectures, on-the-ward time, etc., but was probably relatively conscientious in the grand scheme of things.
Throughout my training, I always felt a bit of a fraud, partly because I'd drifted into medicine and was surrounded by people who (claimed they) had wanted to be doctors since they were zygotes. I always felt I'd weaselled my way onto the wrong course, and was taking up a space meant for someone more deserving, someone who really wanted to be a doctor. Every year, every exam, I though, "now's when they'll find me out; I'll fail the year and bugger off and do something else". I failed individual subjects here and there, but I never failed a year - and, as the course went on, what started as 'I'll see if I like it' became 'fucking hell, I'm going to be a doctor'. In my fourth year, I discovered Psychiatry and, for the first time thought that, just maybe, I'd manage to pull this off.
The other reason I felt a fraud, I think, is that I'd had almost no sexual experience before Uni. If Medicine had been a less... heteronormative subject, or maybe if my Uni had been more metropolitan, I might have used those five years more profitably in terms of sexual experimentation. I did have sex, but not really enough to confirm or refute my barely-acknowledged fears of poovery. I spent a lot more time angsting about not having met The Right Woman, and so on. To my regret, I managed to pass the entirety of my medical training in the closet. In my defence, only one brave soul in my medical year did otherwise, and he was horribly ostracised. I've subsequently discovered that a good half-dozen of us were secretly gay.
So... I didn't really make the most of my student days, for various reasons. I always felt I was catching up, that the party had moved on elsewhere and I'd missed the fun stuff. In retrospect, I spent far, far too much of the five years worrying. I should've relaxed, got pissed more, got out of my face, and had more sex. It wasn't until I became a junior doctor, really, that I began to do that stuff in earnest.
I did discover I liked dancing, though. That was good. |
}. This all tends to leave me very inattentive and restless for lectures. I normally have to sketch something on my page, while taking notes, while listening to the lecturer, while texting somebody in an effort to simulate multi-tasking and keep myself from almost literal paroxysms of boredom. 