Its not PE

When I came to loughborough I wasn't quite sure what to expect from sports science, I had a vague idea that I might brush up on my anatomy which has been increasingly forgotten since my pre clinical years and learn a bit about sports injuries which would hopefully be helpful whatever future speciality I pick.

When I tell everyone Im intercalating in sports science everyone assumes that means I want to be a sports doctor, to be honest, I really don't. I want to do paediatrics but there is only one intercalated course really relevant for this at the moment and this year is the first year they are running it so sadly there was only 1/2 external places making it very competative and I didn't get on it. So I was left choosing from 3 other intercalated places - I could have stayed at my home university and studied psychology, gone to london and studied maternal/foetal health or come here to loughborough. I really wanted to experience somewhere different for a year so that ruled my own uni out. The london course looked interesting in aspects but contained a bit too much embryology for me which I'm not really a fan of. I was seriously tempted to go to london though because I thought it would be a really cool place to live and experience for a year plus a lot of my friends from medical school had got places to intercalate there so I would not be leaving everyone behind. In the end though the prospect of doing a course I prefered the look of (I thought it looked much less dry and dull) and the chance to not be a sheep and to do something completely different swayed me.

So here I am, in loughborough, the only student here from my medical school not only this year but ever - maybe I will be a trend setter ;). Despite my initial fears about living in Falk Egg it only took me a few days of freshers week to realise I was going to have fantastic year. And when I say freshers week, I mean freshers TWO weeks, they really don't call it the loughborough experience for nothing! I have to say it put my orginal freshers week to shame, for example my freshers ball was in a club with some allegedly famous dj who really I had never heard of...Loughborough freshers ball was held at the MASSIVE students union with free fair ground rides outside, Max and Ob from Hollyoaks (which used to be a guilty pleasure of mine during my first few years of med school) hosting it throughout, live music from the Vengaboys and Eliza dolittle, fire displays...and so much more! It was amazing!

My flatmates are all female and lovely so I feel I have been very lucky. By pure coincedence one of them is a third year sports science student which has certainly been useful as lecturers still aren't that used to intercalating students (the intercalating course has only been run a few years) and sometimes assume everyone knows how to do something (for example how to use SPSS - a statistics analysing programme) but we really don't. The rest are freshers on a wide variety of courses and I'm really enjoying being out of the med student bubble for a year (as much as I in many ways love it!)

I will talk more about what my actual course involves later (need to get back to dissertation now!) but I will just counter a common misconception by saying: Its not pe!

Halfadoc xx