Internship, noun: a period of time during which a student or new graduate gets practical experience in a job, for example during the summer holiday
(I thought it would be cool to start this post with the definition of Internship from the Oxford dictionary). As you can guess from the title, I'm about to start my medical experience at the Hospital, the next week on tuesday (or monday, I'm still waiting notice from the ward).
I am pretty excited about it, even though our internship is actually more of a series of lectures in the hospital rather than a real clinical experience. Moreover, because of the whole Covid situation, we very likely won't be allowed to see the patients and interact with them (which is probably the main purpose of having an internship in the first place I guess, but it is what it is). I have done all the vaccinations required (including covid of course), I just need to take a swab test on thursday and I'll be all set.
Next week we will start in the nephrology department (me and 3 other good friends of mine), which is a bit scary because I'm not that prepared on the kidney subject. Unfortunately my class is following a new "compressed" study plan, which basically means we had to anticipate a bunch of exams in the first 3 years, in order to leave the last year "free" for our thesis and graduation. As I'm writing this I'm realizing that many of you don't know how the italian med-school works, so I'll give a brief explanation (also, I want to fill this post a little bit):
Med school in Italy lasts 6 years (it's the longest run among all of the courses). You can access by taking a national test (the infamously hard "test d'ingresso", at least if you want to enroll in a public university, we also have private Universities with their own entry test), then in the first 2 years you learn the "basics" of biology and human anatomy-physiology (I think this is called pre-med in the US, not sure about it), and in the final 4 years you're taught the "real deal" (diseases, clinical practice, you do your internships etc.). On the sixth year you discuss a thesis and graduate. Then you take a national test (the big ole "Scuola di Specializzazione Medica" quiz, SSM Test for friends - if it has any) and depending on your score you're assigned to a specialization (you may find this crazy, and honestly I wouldn't blame you, but for now this solution is the only reasonable route; maybe I'll make a post about my take on this).
So, back to us. Our Uni tried to anticipate our internship period (which had always started on the fourth year), hence a lot of exams, to give us some breath on the final years (mainly to write the thesis). The fact is, we're the first class of students to test this new "approach", so while the cons are pretty much in front of everyone (eg. me and a good share of my fellows don't know how a fucking kidney works [metaphorically speaking of course] because we had to shrink a damn big amount of tests in a small exam session), the pros are yet to be seen (I love how they talk about the sixth year as if it was a golden year of some sorts).
Anyway, that's the deal - I'm damn excited to start next week. You'll probably hear from me soon. bye bye.
- Fruff0, on 10/25/2021 at 19:09 UTC+2