New Experiences

Hello!

Apologies for the prolonged silence, I grew a year older recently and attended all manner of surprise parties and gift-giving events as a result.

Already this year, myself and my colleagues have been thrust into a couple of new experiences and have a few more to look forward to in the very immediate future.

The first was the start of an inter-professional module, in which Occupational Therapists, Physiotherapists, Nurses, Midwives, Learning Difficulty Specialists and us Physiologists were divided into groups and given a series of tasks to plan with the aim of completing them throughout the year. Presumably, this is to simulate a clinical multi-disciplinary team and to help prepare us for the inescapable fact that setups such as these are going to be present throughout the rest of our careers.

I shan’t lie; I was more than slightly nervous about the whole thing.

I didn’t want to be there and neither did my colleagues, so I felt I was correct in assuming that the rest of the group who were to be allocated with me would also rather be spending their time in other ways.

It turns out, my assumption was correct. This is not to say that we as a group were disinterested once we had arrived at the meeting; quite the opposite, in fact. As it turns out, my group are all a studious bunch and, like myself, have taken the view that whilst it isn’t particularly ideal, the quicker we muck in and do the work, the quicker we can be done with it and get on with our degrees.

This however, was something that I was prepared for (to an extent). What I was not expecting, was my second new experience: to be assigned two first year students to mentor.

I shan’t lie; I’m still more than slightly nervous about the whole thing.

The last time I was in any way responsible for someone’s learning was the last restaurant in which I worked (a two-rosette affair, so as you can imagine, there was not much room for error). The televised “Gordon Ramsay” style of teaching, wherein the senior-most member of staff berates, belittles and rattles off the first 75% of the “Viz Profanisaurus”, is actually not that far from reality (the first time I burned a piece of fish I was subjected to the most obscene eight hours of verbal abuse that I have ever experienced), and although this is not the way I’d ever speak to another human being, I’m very well aware of the fact that I’ve been exposed to this ‘style’, and I’m frightened that I fall into it if I get asked the same question for the fifth time (it works: I have NEVER burned another piece of fish).

In fairness, this is just another challenge I want to overcome, so I can, all joking aside, not wait to help these new students leap the same hurdles that I have already and give them all the preparation they require for the coming months.

Thank you.