Pathology and Microbiology Intercalation

Would you intercalate, given your time again?
Yeah definitely, with things like the national prho matching scheme leading to greater competition for top jobs you are gonna do yourself no harm doing it. Its also nice to take a break from medical style uni-life and become a proper student with more free time than u know what to do with.

Do you recommend Path & Micro?
If you want a fairly medically relevant, lightish workload course then this is the muts nuts

Outline of course structure
You select 4 units to study, a total of 80 lectures and you do a project which can be lab or library based.

Assessment
20% 2nd year medicine mark
20% Project mark and project viva
60% Exams from each unit and a data interpretation exam

Department support
Bloody marvellous, they love having medics in the department and are really supportive. The have regular student staff meetings to discuss the course so cock ups that happened with new units this year will be sorted for next year. I got my project mark back the day after my project viva and well ahead of exams.

Weekly workload
Erm…. Its really up to you. Theres recommended reading if your uber keen. No assessed work throughout the year (not always a good thing because uv no idea what level you are working at). Your only tested on 4 units, but u can take attend as many as u like. There are some really good topics to choose from so this isn’t as nerdy as it might sound.

Enjoyment
I found that research isn’t for me. The project was quite isolated and boring but that really is luck of the draw as to what project u get. I guess I quite enjoyed the year but mostly because it was a break from medicine to try something new. I did all my units in the first 2 teaching blocks, which meant I finished all my lectures 2 weeks before xmas. This gave me a lot of free time, which was ace but it was hard to stay motivated on the project part.

Subject matter: what you expected, flexible, stimulating?
Subject matter was pretty much what I expected, quite a lot of way to overcomplicated detail- get used to acronyms made up by very sad scientists with no social life (things like “MDM2” which stands for mouse double minute 2) and give up all hope of being able to link these acronyms to what they actually mean or do. Some of it was very clinically relevant and interesting, but this is a science course and the non-medics complained when a few lectures got too clinical.

Its very flexible- any combination of units can be taken, but I would recommend advanced immunology as a pre-requisite for any of the other immunology units.

Projects: scope, outcomes (conferences, publications etc)
I got stuck out at Southmead in an underground lab with a lack of windows. I was the only student there and it had recently failed in a grant application- this meant it was not unusual for me to be in the lab by myself for 3-4 days at a time with no-one to chat too. But the people there were all friendly and really helped when it came to writing things up.

My project didn’t work, but I still got a first for it so don’t panic if it all goes tits up. No publications though!

Overall: Good bits and Bad bits

Good:

• Low workload compared to other BSc
• Good support and feedback
• Clinically relevant

Bad:

• The project was laborious
• The students weren’t that keen to socialise
• No assessed work means its hard to know what level your working at when u write up projects
• You have to pay for 2 copies of your project to be printed out- it cost me 43 quid!!!
• Hard to stay motivated
• Compared to other BSc I don’t feel I have gained as many useful skills in time management, essay writing and reading and reviewing scientific papers.

Other comments
If your motivated and self-disciplined to work when u quite easily could just sit and watch neighbours this is a good choice for you and you could walk a first class degree. If you’ve ever utter the phrase “if id just done an hour a day all last term…” before exams then this still could be for your but u might need to work on those cramming skills.

Mark out of ten
7/10