Hi my name's Syed and I study medicine.
Originally I'm from Birmingham, so it's pretty close by.
And yeah, growing up I was always pretty interested in like the human body
and studying it and studying medicine seemed like a good choice for me.
I went to school in Birmingham
and then I did IB, which is a little bit different to A-levels.
You do six subjects and so that was very rigorous,
but we studied loads of different stuff.
Um, and I did biology at school and that was kind of where
my passion was, where I was excited to turn up to lessons
and that's where it kind of stemmed from yeah.
I'm really interested in like problem solving.
So like what gets me
ticking is like a difficult problem that other people can't solve.
I know I just get a kick out of that.
It's very satisfying.
We do a lot
of like case reviews in medicine.
And so when nobody knows like what the issue is and then you figure out,
that's what makes me tick And also like looking to the future as well.
For me, medicine is like always changing.
Um, and there's a lot of like developments with like A.I.
and like technology and that's really interesting to me.
Like, I love tech as well.
So it's kind of like a mix, like I could have done computer science.
I could have gone into medicine, but I always thought, you know,
you can always be a doctor who loves tech rather than tech guy
who wants to save lives.
I guess for me, like coming out of school, I really like that academic environment.
I wanted to be surrounded by like motivated people
who were like passionate about like single topic.
So really it was just to find other
like minded people who would be similar to me, have similar interests to me.
That's what I found going to university, kind of worked. It
seemed like a great way to make friends.
So yeah, like I said, I'm from Birmingham, which is like pretty close.
It's only an hour away.
I thought about either staying in Birmingham, or going to Nottingham
because to be honest, I never really heard of Nottingham before
like researching universities.
All I knew was like Robin Hood.
Um, so I was applying
during the COVID pandemic, so I wasn't allowed to come to Nottingham.
So a lot of my stuff was like virtual tours and stuff.
When I saw the campus, it was really, really pretty.
And that's why I picked Nottingham, because it was like super green,
very different to like all the other campuses I looked at
and that was like my main driving force.
And I also did have one cousin who came to Nottingham
and they only had good things to say about it.
They said it is smaller than Birmingham, but the town has like so much stuff to do
and they really felt welcome here.
So I guess a lot of my preconceptions are like from movies.
So seeing
like college
was like in America, but I didn't know how to explain it.
I was very scared about meeting new people, but was so excited.
So like nervous and anxious, but also I couldn't wait to get started.
Um, and then when I started, again it was in the Covid pandemic,
so we're all kind of like in our rooms, but it just felt like a big school trip,
to be honest.
Like when you go to school and you like, go away for a week.
So all in the dorms, made really good friends
with like the people in my corridor.
And very quickly, like in freshers week, all that anxiety kind of like dissipates
once you find your people and you start getting involved in like societies.
And yeah, it was really fun.
Dissection when you cut open a cadaver, like a dead body.
Someone has donated their body to science.
And it's quite scary in the beginning, uh, because
for most people it's the first ever time you've seen a dead body.
But after the initial shock subsides.
You feel like a great sense of honor and pride that somebody
has entrusted me to look at their body.
And it's a great way to learn
about the human body, like you can learn from lectures and like online,
but there's no substitute
for getting stuck in and actually seeing what muscles do, what
how the heart looks, holding your heart in your hand
and seeing all the stuff that can go wrong.
It makes you feel grateful to be alive.
Living in halls is great because everybody was like in the same position as you.
They're all nervous about making friends.
Everybody was like from different places.
And the
best thing was just we used to just go out and sit on the downs, which is like this
area on University Park Campus, which is just a big field.
You live next to a big fields, which is great
because you feel completely isolated from the rest of the world.
And we all just sat in circles and just told stories and told each other
like where we're from and stuff.
And that was really fun
and then the university would open up the dining halls in COVID
just as like a free space and give us free food.
That was really, really fun because you just be there having a loads of chips
and cakes late into the hours of the night and just chatting with your friends.
And that was one of my fondest memories.
In summer, like when it's hot, they open up the lake
and you can use the boats to go up and down the lake, which is really huge.
But you can get like six of your friends and tie two boats together.
And it's really fun, you can have races and that's really fun to do in summer.
That was crazy at the beginning because I had no idea Nottingham even had a lake.
I didn't look, I was very surprised, there's so much water
and that was really fun.
If you're looking for a less physically intense thing
to do, going to Millennium Gardens is really nice.
It's like this very pretty well-maintained,
like meditation garden, like lots of stones and a pretty fountain.
You can just go and chill and chat with your friends.
That's really fun to do as well.
The best thing to do off campus is definitely
to go into the old market square, which is like Nottingham
City Centre because there's always so much to do.
I remember when I first came to Nottingham they used to have food festivals
and they're always celebrating something
like Black History Month or South Asian Appreciation Month
and that was really fun because I'd never seen something
like it before and it's great to support local businesses
which are like scattered throughout Nottingham.
So that's, that's something that's really fun.
The best thing about living at university was probably being able
to get to know your friends so well because I think
the bond that you share with people that you live with day in, day out
is quite special.
You're eating together, meal times, if you live in catered accommodation.
But also my friends who live in
like non catered accommodation, they just love the sense of independence
and just every day it was something new because nobody has really set plans
and some days you just like, let's go out, let's do this and you can
because you're living out at university.
I think the best thing about
being University of Nottingham student is the variety that Nottingham has.
So you have loads of different campus and loads of different courses,
so you're always going to different places and meeting new people.
And that to me was really special because I didn't know that Nottingham
had so many campus.
Originally I just thought it was one place.
You soon realise that there are like hopper buses which can like take you
to Jubilee Campus or Sutton Bonington.
And that to me is like the best thing about being a University of Nottingham
student specifically is that you get to see so many different places
and it is so pretty.
The best thing has to be full body dissection
because not all medical schools do that.
And so seeing like where all the organs are in relation
to the rest of the body is very, very useful.
And also sitting in a group of your friends
and like having like this shared
task to do is really fun
because if you like problem solving,
seeing what makes the human body
tick is very, very exciting.
The university does a lot of stuff, especially when like Mental Health Week,
there's loads of stalls in Portland building, which is the Student Union.
The medical school, has lots of structures in place
like medsoc support and they buddy you up like a medic parent scheme.
It's not an actual parent but a person in the year above basically, becomes
like your medic dad or your medic mum and they'll check in on you
from time to time, share their notes and it feels like a big family.
So yeah, I do feel supported.
The funny thing is like you can meet your medic it great great
great great grandfather who's like like a surgeon somewhere.
Yeah and you go like on meals together and stuff
and it's mostly because they do do formal like personal tutors
and like peer mentors, but it's supposed to be more informal.
You just have a chat and sometimes that's what you need.
They are also are very close in age to you.
They've been through the same stuff.
This is very useful.
I guess my biggest inspiration would be my parents
because they're also doctors and growing up, seeing
what they went through and going to work with them, sometimes
it was really fun and very inspiring because I saw like how dedicated
they were, how much time and effort they put into taking care of people.
And I think it's safe to say that, yeah, that impacted
my decision in choosing to do medicine.
The great thing about Nottingham is that there's so many societies
and there's a new society popping up every day.
So there's loads of cultural and religious societies like ISoc and PakSoc
which is like the Islamic society and the Pakistani society.
So if you're looking for people like a similar,
like ethnic cultural background as you,
it's really easy to find them and then they host loads of events.
So going out for like meals and food, that was really fun
and then being part of MedSoc as well, which is the Medical Society
for Medicine students.
They organise events like balls and boat parties
and then just getting involved in volunteering.
So Nottingham has the Student Ambassador Scheme where you can help
with widening participation, which is really important,
especially in medicine as well.
So getting people from different backgrounds
so they might be the first in a family to go to university
or they might not even be thinking about going to university.
So as a student ambassador, Nottingham will bring
like year ten students or even younger from like the surrounding schools.
And you show them how great it is to be a University of Nottingham student.
Just being a university
in general, it's really great for like raising the aspirations.
And the kids always say they love it.
That's super fun, cause
I guess I came from like a quite privileged background.
So my
parents being
doctors and stuff, but like even at school,
it's really fun.
Like, cause in some schools, you get teachers saying to kids,
don't even apply for medicine. You won't get in.
You have to get the highest grades.
And some of my friends, they were like dude I'm surprised I'm even here.
And I'm like, no, like you can, it's great.
And so yeah showing the kids, they are always asking like,
How would you get paid?
It's not about that.
It's really fun and fulfilling.
But yeah, I do a lot of it. It's very fun. It's passion.
Yeah.
The biggest thing I've discovered about myself is probably how open I am
to trying new things and how, if I really want to do something, I can.
So I had this perception before coming to university that I'd be busy
all the time studying and I am busy all the time,
but it's not studying like you can do other stuff
and saying yes to things is very important at university
because you never know like what opportunity is like
just around the corner and you meet amazing people along the way.
So yeah, I think that's the biggest thing I find out about myself
is that I can do a lot and everybody can do a lot.
You meet people who are like part of GB Olympic teams here,
and you're like how do you do that and study at the same time?
It's crazy.
So you learn a lot about time management.
You learn how to be efficient with your time because
often you just find like if you don't have stuff
going on in the day, like you could just you can spend all day revising,
you know, there's always something - a new lecture that's always coming out.
And so that's one skill that I really learnt is like how
to set deadlines, set schedules, be strict with yourself.
That's a very important thing to do, and I think that will help me after
I graduate in, you know, not letting work take over your whole life.
It's very important to have like a work life balance, especially nowadays.
So having having
those structures in place to say that, you know, I will not work on Fridays,
I'll have that day for myself and
just segmenting time
so that you're doing something all of the time.
Because when you have, when you're lazy,
then that's when like things can kind of go wrong.
But it's also important to have down time.
The most demanding thing
about going to university is probably the workload is very different.
If you're coming straight out of school.
Well,
some of my friends who took Gap years before,
they were just having fun for a whole year.
Then you come and it's it's very
it's a lot it's a lot of work that you've got to do.
And the best way that I found of overcoming
it is realising that everyone's struggling the same way.
And so if you do ask your friends to help out.
You can have a study session, a group study session, that's really fun
because when you're sitting there alone just looking at slides and trying to watch
your videos, try and force the information to your head, it's really difficult.
But you can test each other, talk over subjects,
and sometimes just talking out like a really difficult, complex thing
that you can't get your head around
talking it out and it will just come to you like a light bulb moment.
And so, yeah, that's, that's the best way to deal with it.
And then you know you've just got to put in the hours
and try and reward yourself
after doing like a big chunk of work because that that helps a lot as well.
I guess the thing about medicine is that your future can look
very different depending on what you do.
There's so many different avenues you can take.
I guess for me, I look at trying to help the future of medicine.
So maybe going into policy,
planning and looking at management.
So general practice of primary care, which is like
the first when patients come, they normally will see their GP.
And so seeing how you can make that like
whole patient experience better and really focusing
on like the actual user for the NHS, that's kind of what I see
making like the best like, I just want to
create change would be great to do that.
I guess having my Nottingham degree at the end is a little bit
special to me because I get two degrees by studying medicine.
You get
a bachelor's of medical science degree because you have to do a research project
which I'm about to go into and you get I think it's Bachelor of Medicine,
Bachelor Surgery Degree, and so it is a five year course.
And so having that degree will mean I would have made
some really great friends
and have lots and lots of memories by being here for five years.
And I'll also come out with two degrees.
So yeah, it'll mean a lot to me.
I always believe in like dreaming big and so I guess dreaming big would be
to one day be health secretary or have like a position
where you could change the day to day running
of how medicine is like given this country like all over the world,
so that people feel comfortable coming to the doctors
and they know
that by going to the doctors, they're going to get the care they deserve
and they feel confident in like health care professionals everywhere.
That, to me would be the dream.