MSc stuff...

Disclaimer – I apologise in advance if anyone dies of boredom reading this post. It wasn’t my intention ;)

All in all, this past year has been dedicated to my MSc in medicine at The University of Manchester. The major focus was my dissertation which involved a lot of long work hours at the hospital, sleepless nights and quite a fair bit of travelling. Seen as it was such as major part in my life for this past year – and at certain moments the ONLY important thing in my life (sadness I know!)... well I thought I should explain what I have been doing for these past twelve months. So here goes....

My MSc kicked off in September where after my initial induction meetings and lectures, I started to attend a number of interesting talks from the MIMIT seminar series that were a part of one of my MSc modules. It was also a good way to get to get to know my fellow students better as we had all come from different med courses. Soon after this we started choosing our preferred tutorial sessions which involved a lot of research, preparing and giving presentations and then submitting written assignments on our chosen topics. All fine so far, just like my undergraduate degree… and then came the difficult part. Who knew choosing a dissertation topic would be so difficult both for the MRes (purely research based) and MSc (partly taught element) students alike.

The great thing (or bad thing, depends on how you look at it) is that at Manchester university, the MSc students were given the option of either carrying out a full 35 week project for the dissertation OR splitting it into a 10 week and a 25 week project which are written up separately and submitted for their dissertation. I initially thought this was a good thing and I was very keen to carry out two projects that were both in different disciplines; one would be clinically based and the other would be lab based. I felt this was a great way to pick up a larger skill set, provide me with a better all round knowledge base and also create a lot more options for my further medical degree. My initial 10 week project was to be lab based as I felt I could get on with this relatively quickly whereas the clinical project would require a lot more planning time etc and so that was allocated to the 25 week project. Also the various project titles indicated the time span that would be required for completion of the project.

I chose the topic of wound and keloid systems for my 10 week lab based project with my supervisor who was a plastic surgeon at one of the Manchester Hospitals. After the initial meeting, my supervisor felt that the keloid system project would be quite hard to complete in the time I had in terms of training and lab set up etc. Therefore I was offered an alternative project which I thought was fair enough. The alternative project was on the topic of breast implants and the adherence and rejection by the fibroblasts that grow around the implants. Basically it was in the area of cosmetic surgery and I’ll be honest, although it may be an interesting topic for others, personally it wasn’t what I quite I had in mind. However despite the niggling feeling, I stuck with it and went away and did some reading on the topic.

A week later, I returned to my future supervisor and told him that I was happy to undertake it for 10 weeks after which I intended to switch to a clinical project for the 25 weeks. My supervisor was initially taken aback and wanted me to stay for the full 35 weeks but I stood firm and a terrified me explained my reasoning about gaining a larger skill set etc. His response was that although my reasons were good, he felt it was more beneficial for me to stick to one project as it would provide me with more in-depth knowledge and also I would be able to publish more papers and attend conferences, which in turn would look better on my CV and future interviews. I thought about it and realised that he was also right and very appreciative of his advice. As a final warning he asked me to reconsider my decisions as “clinical projects are not always what they seem”, but I stood firm and told that my interest in medicine had always been patient orientated. He shook my hand and wished me the best of luck - it was a sort of terrifying but very informative meeting.

I started and successfully completed my clinical project and this was the result...

My dissertation - for which I will hopefully get a decent mark (iA)

The story of my dissertation ... Well that’s dedicated to a separate blog post altogether seen as this post is getting a bit too long :)