Pandemic Diaries: Surviving One Year of Medical School in a Different Country

Several Akkaya, Year 2

Last year, after an unexpected series of events which we are all familiar with, I had to stay home during the whole academic year. The only problem was that my home is 4089 kilometres from the university. 

I was born and raised in Samsun, a city at the Black Sea region of Turkey. Samsun is famous for its historic role in the Turkish War of Independence and its beautiful coast that is frequently used by freighters, ships and fishing boats. For me, the main beauty of the city comes from the fact that my whole family lives there. 

I moved to Istanbul in 2015 for high school at Robert College of Istanbul, one of the best in Turkey, and I was a residential student for three years. I was only fourteen and my parents counted down the days to each holiday to see me when I came back to visit them. From then till today, I’ve been flying and spending lots of time in airports. 

An even more exciting adventure began when I was accepted by the medical school at the University of Leeds. I knew I was going to travel even more and be away from my parents for even longer. What I didn’t know, like everyone else on this planet, was that we were going to be hit by this pandemic hard enough that we wouldn’t be able to leave our houses, let alone move to university. Consequently, my travel plans were postponed when the university told all of us that lectures and tutorials were going to be online. This was when I started my journey of studying medical school online alone at home while my doctor parents were trying save people’s lives from the virus. 

There is definitely something unique about starting medical school during a pandemic. Before the pandemic, I had to do my medical school interview online while the doctors interviewing me were at their offices, working at the hospital that same day.  My interviewer was a paediatric neurologist who wore a facemask all throughout the interview. It was hard to see his reactions. Meanwhile, I was home in a warm and sunny Samsun. I was sweating hard from excitement while thinking how fortunate it was that they wouldn’t realize because I was miles away from them. Thankfully, the interview went well and I am here today. However, I didn’t know at the time that the whole academic year was going to be online just like my interview. 

In Turkey, my mother is a GP and my father is a neurologist, but during the pandemic both of them were given extra duties which put even more pressure on them. My mother worked with Turkey’s Ministry of Health, directing healthcare staff to visit Covid-19 patients at their homes, checking their symptoms and providing medication when needed during their quarantine period. My father worked as a deputy chief physician at their hospital, maintaining good quality health services despite the staff absences. Because of the great amount of responsibility they both had, they worked on their phones or went to the hospital after their shifts. Basically, there was a lot of stress inside the house and I spent all day doing our online lectures on my computer alone in my room. In Turkey, from March to June 2020 there was a curfew for people under 20 due to the increased number of cases, which meant that I wasn’t allowed to leave the house except one Friday morning in every few weeks. Luckily, because my parents were healthcare workers and were exempt from the curfew rules, they would take me out for a walk or a drive around the city after they come home from work. 

In our IDEALS sessions; my tutor would ask me about how things were going in Turkey. We would discuss curfews and compare the number of cases in Turkey against those in England. But, regardless of what country we spent those hard months in, my classmates and I have been through a challenging time and we can’t even say that those times are over yet. Although it’s February 2022, the number of cases haven’t dropped to a negligible level yet. Unlike some other courses or universities, most of our lectures are still going online except for few group work tutorials, anatomy practical sessions, and of course the primary and secondary care placements. This style of teaching leaves us to do most of the learning by ourselves. Hopefully everything will be back to normal again someday. Regardless of when that is, we have a long and adventurous story to tell our children and patients when we become doctors.