The Great Medic Insight Experience 2K17

Hey, Y’all! last week I attended the week long program, medic insight (which is as self-explanatory as it sounds) hence why I am late in posting and I have decided to share my experience for future aspiring medics. The program intends to allow fifth-year pupils in high school (i.e me) to experience the life of a typical medical student and much more. I have included their “About” page below so they can say for themselves.

The Glasgow one I attended was only in its 3rd year running, a baby when compared to its Edinburgh and Dundee counterparts. The Glasgow program runs twice, I attended week 1 as seen from my name card.

I felt one of the best things were how meticulously planned everything was, from tirelessly scouring through several hundred applications (from Glasgow alone!!!) in order to admit 50 lucky people for each week and giving each of them a personalised timetable. This was an impressive feat, considering it is run by Glasgow medics who have their own lectures and exams outside of organising Medic Insight.

Thoughts #2 – Talks, Lectures and Time Travel

On Wednesday I – with some other students who expressed an interest in pursuing engineering – attended a talk by a civil engineer. Essentially it was just a talk about his life and some big projects he was involved in, e.g the London 2012 velodrome. I found it rather dull since it focused on civil more than anything else. Was never extremely interested in the engineering discipline so not being fully engaged with the talk isn’t a surprise. Well he’s a civil engineer after all – though he is an Imperial College London graduate which was cool.

Though in contrast I also attended one of the Gifford Lectures held in Glasgow University recently in which the speaker was Caltech Professor Sean Carroll and it was a pretty interesting experience. Carroll spoke about ideas that were mainly based around entropy and his book “The Big Picture”. I was gutted that I could not make any of the other lectures in the series – because of overwhelming amounts of school work of course – but Sean Carroll’s lectures are definitely worth checking out and the inside of Glasgow University was stunning.

Obviously I need to go back to talking about Physics class today. We started Special Theory of Relativity yesterday and I could not enjoy it more. It was incredibly amusing to see all the astonished faces while my teacher was explaining time dilation. And how approaching the speed of light you could theoretically travel into the future but sadly not the past. My classmates’ reactions and sense of denial were absolutely remarkable. You don’t know how much I love watching bewildered reception to physics phenomena!

Till next time,

Susan

 

Thoughts #1 – Higher Physics Notes

Just a short thoughts post. These may be regular and spontaneous 😊

So as a high school student I am extremely excited to have received the second part of the Dynamic Universe notes today for the Higher Physics course – which has a very pretty image of the Crab Nebula taken by the Hubble on the front cover – that covers most of the theoretical sections of the first unit.

We are finally on the cosmology and astrophysics element of the course after doing months of motion equations. I had a skim through the notes and it’s looking like it’s going to be a fun journey. Amazing feeling when the Scottish Qualifications Authority think you’ve enough maths knowledge to include a little of the exciting physics e.g. Relativity. Though because of our still limited mathematical knowledge, we’ve barely touched to surface. Long way to go, high school physics!

Have a nice day,
Susan

*These are not standard weekly blog posts, just spontaneous thought asides.