Year 1

  • Welcome to Imperial College School of Medicine

    Congratulations on securing your spot at one of the best medical schools in the country! Starting off as a fresher at any medical school can seem ever-so daunting, but fear not! – Here at Imperial, we’ve all somehow survived but not without a little help from the Faculty of Medicine and our student-led Students’ Union. Between us, we cover all your needs and wants whether it be educational, social or pastoral so that one day you will be able to see that Dr prefix in front of your name.

    This page was designed so that you can get a better overview of what you will be encountering this year as well as providing you with valuable resources so that you can take control of your own education (Scary I know but you want that prefix, don’t you?)

    If you ever have a problem or question, please email at icsm.ao12GE@imperial.ac.uk. I am always available to talk.

    Best of luck to you this year!

    Ken Wu
    ICSMSU Academic Officer (Years 1, 2 & GE)
    [e] icsm.ao12GE@imperial.ac.uk

  • Overview

    For the majority of you, first year or freshers’ year will be the biggest shock to your system. Living away from home means that you have to fend for yourself but it also means you have full control over your life and your learning. There is scheduled teaching given in the forms of lectures, practicals, tutorials, dissections, pbl sessions etc, and there are the dreaded exams dotted around in summer term; however other than that, you have complete free-reign of how you learn.

    Unfortunately the good-old days of leaving everything to the last minute and cramming are over: you are not just learning to pass an exam, you’re learning stuff that will be relevant to you when you are responsible for people’s lives. But enough of the seriousness, freshers’ is also the time to try out new things whether it is a club, a society or a new hairdo.

    Autumn Term

    After your first week and a half of introductory lectures (how to use a computer, what to do in a fire alarm – the bare essentials) and occupational health visits, you will start on the first theme that builds on the basics that you have learned in Biology already – this is called Molecules, Cells & Disease (MCD) There are numerous tutorials and practicals intertwined with MCD, varying from a tutorial on cyanide poisoning to practicals on enzyme kinetics to a blood taking practical.

    During autumn term you will also experience a module called Foundation of Clinical Practice (FoCP), which will help to develop the understanding of why Patient Centred Medicine is important in modern day medicine. Starting in this term, you will also get Problem Based Learning sessions (normally fortnightly), which will allow you to integrate your prior knowledge with information from lectures and other resources. It is also a chance to hone your research and presentation skills within the comforts of a small group of friends.

    Spring & Summer Term

    You start with the dreaded Formative that will test you on the material you were taught in Autumn, however I would advise you not to fret too much about it over Christmas, try to enjoy your holiday! The lectures given in term 2 and 3 are all part of two different topics: Life Support System (LSS) and Life Cycle and Regulatory Systems (LCRS), these are the topics you came to medschool for. You get taught Proper Anatomy with weekly dissections at Charing Cross Hospital as well as Living Anatomy Sessions.

    Exams

    The summative exams, i.e. those that matter, are located in Summer Term: starting with MCD just after Easter. Then the rest of them are at the end of the term: LSS1, LSS2 and LCRS. The format of the papers is generally around 40 Single Best Answer Questions and 5 Short Answer Questions with sometimes some Extended Matching Questions. The intranet has an exams page with detailed breakdowns and dates of each paper. You may turn around and go “Multiple Choice? It’s that easy?”, I kid you not they are not. Results are posted a month later and you’ll have completed 1/6 of a way through medschool!

  • Representation

    Responses from last SSLG – 21/11/2012

    Teaching

    • Some slides from lectures have been slow to upload; lecturers will be reminded to upload them this term.
    • Students requested that the metabolism quiz could be left on the intranet for longer and it was agreed that it would go back onto the intranet over the Christmas break to help with revision. Course leaders are also being reminded to regularly check Blackboard Discussion Groups
    • The clinical communications course was very well received 

    Exams & assessment

    • There was some confusion over the structure of exams – this has been clarified in the exams talk in December and a document has been published on the intranet.

    SOLE

    • Sole will be replaced next year by a more flexible system that will include photos of lectures to aid accurate responses

    GMC meeting

    • On 30/11 10 students met with the GMC to give feedback on the course

    Other

    • More lactose-free and vegan options in the SAF café will be made available

    The next SSLG meeting will be held on Wednessday 13th March.

    Please do not hesitate to email us if you have any concerns – we will do our best to address them and represent your views to the staff.

    Why become a year rep?

    You will have an opportunity to run for one of the four positions of being your year’s educational representation in the weeks following Fresher’s.  Year Reps are your number one port of call for anything educational.

    So if you like being in the know and are passionate, enthusiastic and wouldn’t mind being the voice of your year, then we want you!

    Years reps attend termly student-focussed meetings called Staff-Student Liaison Groups (SSLG) where students can voice their opinions to the course leaders themselves. The Faculty of Medicine and ICSMSU pride ourselves on the strong relationship we have with each other and how changes actual occur from student feedback and suggestions. In the past, year reps have had huge impacts on making exams more bearable by spreading out them out at the end of year 1 and 2. They have also started from a student suggestion to provide us with valuable exam feedback, which we never got before.

     

  • Going to a new place with new people and a buzzing atmosphere allowed me to start completely new. There are so many people to meet and so much to get involved with. In my opinion academically first year is about learning how you learn best. Lectures are a completely different set up to school lessons and it takes a while to get the hang of it. It is important to remember that everyone finds a different learning style more easy, so it is best to find yours.

    Regarding clubs and societies, get involved in everything that you can do and see what you enjoy. There are so many opportunities for “once in a lifetime” trips or experiences and you are only ever a proper fresher once.- A 3rd Year

    First year was one of the best years of my life. I had a great time but a terrible summer.

    The reason was resits. i started ‘work’ during easter, and believe me the inverted commas are significant ones. The problem was that having fallen behind so far, I was always playing catch up. I spent an absolute age making very pretty mcd notes and then realised that I had learnt absolutely nothing from it.

    I went into my MCD and LSS exams with large chunks of the course having never been looked at before. a month after the exams finished, I found out that I’d failed both those exams (not the easiest ones i’m sure you know). and so began the most tedious and boring month and a half of re-revision. While most of the rest of my year went on holiday and chilled, I was sat in a dark rooom looking over some of the most boring material ever covered, with the riots the only slice of excitement in my life.

    It is vital that you first years have a plan, and a good one at that! If you havent been making your own notes so far, consider whether it’s really a good idea to start now. Your first year is where you get the wake up call for what you need to do next year, so just do whatever you know is going to ensure you pass. and finally, when you do work…. WORK! No mucking about on facebook/youtube/whatever else you use to procrastinate. i ended up kidding myself I was working loads just because i was in the library for hours on end, without actually learning much. And good god, if you don’t heed this advice and end up doing resits, heed it then! you’ve worked too hard and commited too much to fall at the first hurdle.- A 2nd Year

    You’ll probably be hearing that Fresher’s is going to be the best week of your life, and for a lot of you that’ll be true. Some people like me though will probably find the year gets better the longer it goes on so don’t get put off if everything isn’t exactly like you imagined at the start. Obviously make the most of Fresher’s, you’ll probably spend 6 years talking about it anyway, but be sure to look forward to what comes after like getting to know your class, getting involved in clubs and societies, as well as the ridiculous amount of events the ICSMSU put on. There’s definitely more than enough to do outside of lectures and you can always get as involved as you want, just be sure to try everything you want to and try not to worry about the work too much, at least not at the start.

  • Resources

    The Formative & Summatives from a Student’s POV – Steve Tran

    This webpage has been designed as a learning tool for you to come and find current revision resources that are available to you in one place.

    Ensure that you make the most of:

    • Self tests accessible via Blackboard
    • Blackboard discussion boards
    • Student and staff-led tutorials throughout the year
    • e-Books, books etc available through the library
    • A student-written EMQ and SAQ question bank (coming soon!)

    DISCLAIMER: All the material found on this page are student-made, so may contain errors, mistakes or in some cases be incomplete. They are also only for personal use. If there is a discrepancy with the material, please follow what the lecturers’ material

    Student Led Tutorials

    Click to download Ken Wu’s Metabolism Tutorial Dec 2012
    Click to download Cheng Zhang’s Muslim Medic Microbiology Tutorial 1/12/2011
    Link to all the Muslim Medic tutorial slides

    Revision notes

    Please look at the Notebank available here: http://www.icsmsu.com/exec/education/notebank/

 
We receive support from the Faculty Education Officer or FEO for short. FEO counters are located at all of our various sites and we are all kept in the loop via email and the undergraduate intranet.
ICSMSU is a student-elected committee that look after and represent the student body, with our President residing over everyone else. There are various officers encompassing differing roles that are listed on our contact page.
MCD covers a variety of different topics stretching from Genetics and DNA to Metabolism to Immunology and Microbiology with a dash of basic Pathology thrown into the mix. This theme builds a solid foundation for the rest of your medical knowledge. This background knowledge will give you a better understanding of how your body works. The only way you’re going to know what’s wrong is by knowing how it should be normally.
This module delivers teaching on:
★ Communication Skills
You get taught how to talk to patients, which at first sounds strange, but you get an understanding of key skills doctors use to get relevant information out of patients. You'll even be surprised that some of the techniques you're taught have been used on you.
★ Epidemiology
This module looks into the spread of disease and why they happen. This was a very topical during the avian and swine flu epidemics. The importance of evidence-based medicine is also taught in this module.
★ Society and Health
You get to look into how society shapes our beliefs in medicine and how they also affects our day to day lives without us really noticing it.
★ First Clinical Attachment
You are given a patient who you follow through-out the year to see how their disease has impacted on their lives (the diseases vary from such as diabetes, renal failure to HIV+ patients.) This module also looks at doctors from the patient's point of view and what they are happy and unhappy about when going to the doctors.
Patient Centred Medicine is a relatively new scheme of thought that improves the quality of care for patients and their compliance. In the past, doctors would be quite paternal and wouldn't have a dialogue with their patients, thus only telling them what to do without factoring in their concerns, needs, and day to day life. Now doctors have a much better dialogue with their patients and involve them in every step of their treatment
Problem Based Learning/PBL is a group-based tutorial system guided by a tutor, which promotes students to take control of the sessions by formulating their own learning objectives and avenues of research from a given case study. Students then come back a week later and present their findings to their colleagues.
Life Support System is broken down into two topics, the first one (LSS1) covering everything involving the thorax and the second one (LSS2) covering generally the abdomen. Other than the Anatomy of the Thorax, you will be taught about everything to do with the heart and lungs in Cardiology & Respiratory Sciences! These are the biggest two topics in LSS as they're pretty important and interlink with various topics in the future. In LSS2, you get taught the abdomen with lectures on the Alimentary and Urinary Systems plus some lectures on Skin These lectures cover both the normal physiology and the important clinical aspects of the different systems.
Life Cycle and Regulatory Systems (LCRS) is pretty self-explanatory with lectures on Endocrinology (how hormones influence your body), Neuroscience (the basics that you will build upon in Year 2), Musculoskeletal with a bit of embryology in the form of Human Life Cycle (You will be taught pregnancy in 60 minutes).
You do dissections within your small groups where you actually get hands-on experience with a corpse. A demonstrator will guide you but you are the ones that actually do the work. This is considered by most, the best way to learn anatomy by getting really involved. Plus you remember these sessions more than lectures.
SBAs are essential multiple choice questions. However a couple of them may be right but the examiners are looking for the BEST answer.
SAQs are marked out of 10 and have a layout very similar to A-level biology questions. They try to integrate different topics into the questions, with a leading 1 mark question that might be followed by a 9 mark or a 4 and 5 marked question. These are the ones people prefer as they can be less specific than the SBAs.
EMQs is essentially a matching words/answers with a question or definition. You are given 10 options and 5 questions, however some options may not be used at all or more than once.