My Story
I started looking into planning my elective about a year ago and found myself very confused. Firstly, I didn’t know where to start, then I found The Electives Network (TEN), a great one-stop website containing elective destinations and hospitals. But this alone didn’t shed too much light, because there were a load of places, with a load of different requirements and application processes. Basically, I was still clueless. So like anyone, I decided to ask around to my friends and the year above. Some gave good advice and some just confused me. But, the best bit of advice I got was to firstly decide what I wanted out of my elective. Do I want to chill and lounge around for 7 weeks? Do I want to work very hard and go in 9-5 every day? Or do I want a mix of both? Click here the video.
I obviously went for the first option and planned an elective in the Caribbean using TEN, dossing about for 7 weeks on 3 different islands. But, my mum wasn’t keen on this and kept reminding me that I’m going to waste my time. Initially I was okay with this, after all, I have the rest of my life to do medicine right? However, I soon realised that I’m probably going to get very bored this way. So, I decided on option 3 and looked into applying for an elective at Harvard University for the first part and was immediately put off by how long the process looked and the hefty price. Then I heard that it was actually possible to do “observerships” where you apply directly to a consultant at the Harvard teaching hospital: Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). Not really expecting much, I found some email addresses online using the MGH website and emailed around with my CV. Luckily, a big name in Plastics & Reconstructive surgery replied and offered me a free 4-week “observership” with him. So you might be wondering what this actually is and how it’s different from applying straight via Harvard’s website? Basically, if you apply through Harvard and their official website, it’s a longer, more complex and expensive process, but if you’re successful, you get the opportunity to do a “clerkship”. The clerkship offers you a more hands-on experience and you can even get your own patients to clerk, admit, create management plans for etc. Whilst an “observership” means that you essentially just follow the doctors around and observe them doing all this with little hands-on opportunity. This sounded fine to me, because I wasn’t really interested in plastics and to be brutally honest, I was doing it just so I could whack down the Harvard name on my CV.
However, this all changed immensely when I was out there. Firstly, the plastic surgery I expected to see was stuff like boob jobs and butt lifts, but the surgery I ended up seeing was totally different. I was seeing mostly peripheral neuro, microsurgery, free flaps and other totally cool stuff. On top of this, my consultant was so inspiring and completely changed my outlook on so many things. So much so, I started doing some research with him and wrote a review paper on an evolving surgical procedure called Targeted Muscle Reinnervation (TMR). Long story short, I had an incredible experience at MGH, and loved working hard; at the end of the day you can only reap what you sow.
So, I had the first part of the elective sorted out, but I still wanted a bit of a holiday for the second bit. I decided to stick with the Caribbean for the second half and went to Tobago with some other medic buddies. I organised to be with the psychiatry department at Scarborough General Hospital using an email I found on TEN. Why psych? Well, because I’ve always found psychiatry super interesting and I also knew they have comfy sofas worldwide, but I also wanted to find out how psychiatry worked in a developing country where the available resources are limited. This was a completely different experience to MGH. The working day started at 8.30am and I was done by 11am most days; super chill basically. It was immensely insightful to see how psychiatry worked out there, with mostly the same services and processes as here, but some understandable differences. We also got up to some super cool stuff around the island, with the highlights being Pigeon point beach, exploring the rainforest, the bioluminescence tour and diving in Coco Reef; have a look @thecamdoc for some pics. Click here the video.
