Finals Countdown

There are a lot of very worried looking final year medical students hanging round the hospital at the moment. They’re pretty easy to spot. It’s the bags under their eyes, it’s the gaunt expressions it’s their whole demeanour that just screams out “I am stressed.”

I don’t like thinking back to the time that I sat my finals because it was really horrible. I’d actually go as far as saying that the run-up to my final medical exams was the worst three month period of my life so far.

Five years of study gets compressed down and assessed in a two-week period. There’s nowhere to hide, you really have to stand up and be counted. The sheer volume of stuff that you have to know is immense. You know that the examiners could pick just about anything in the field of medical science to test you on, so you really have to be able to talk and write sensibly about everything.

You pray that you get something “easy” to get examined on - something like angina, multiple pregnancy or osteoporosis. But you know that they could just as easily pick rare conditions like facioscapulohumeral dystrophy that you may never ever have heard of.

Your whole academic year is trying to achieve the same goals at the same time and EVERYBODY is stressed out. A good proportion of my year were on some sort of anti-anxiety medication in those weeks before the exam. It ends up being like a pressure-cooker of stress because everyone you speak to about the exam is stressed out, and the fact that they’re stressed makes you more stressed, which then stresses them out more and it goes on and on like this.

People who have been through finals try to comfort you by saying stuff like “Just do the study and you’ll be fine. You have to remember that the vast majority of people sitting Finals pass them. The University WANT to pass you, so you have to fuck up pretty badly to fail.” I’m not really convinced that hearing stuff like that was particularly helpful though.

The worst thing about it though is that there seems to be no end to it. There’s nothing to look forward to, there’s nothing to enjoy. You wake up, you study, you go the hospital to try and see some patients. There’s loads of you all doing it so the doctors, nurses and patients in the hospital get pissed off because there are loads of students hanging around. So you come home and study some more. This pattern is repeated day after day, weak after week, month after month and it gets really, really depressing.

Anyway, my finals came and went. They were just as horrible as I imagined them to be. I was unlucky. I didn’t get the easy topics like heart disease or hernias, I got the random stuff and it was horrible. I got through it though. I’d done enough work to say something sensible in each viva so I passed. I got my medical degree and earned the letters after my name and the right to call myself “doctor.”

It took me several weeks to de-stress afterwards, to get my personality back and feel like my normal self. Medical finals are horrible and my heart goes out to all the medical students studying for them up and down the land.

I wish you all the best of luck.