Alternative To Intercalation

William Hedley, Fourth Year Medicine

Medicine has always been demanding, not only once qualified, and surveys of medical students’ mental health show that it’s not getting any easier. Barrages of emails often include the University’s attempts to support us with wellbeing newsletters, though the ultimate responsibility for our wellbeing is our own. Knowing this doesn’t reduce the pressure, the workload, or the burnout, nor will it give you a few more hours of sleep, or stop the commute to Halifax wrecking your weekday social life. Instead, these things end up feeling like intrinsic sacrifices, for an (at this point) unpaid job. Given just how tempting that all sounds, maybe it’s time to reconsider main-lining 5 straight years of it. 

My proposed, prophylactic silver bullet is to simply leave medicine, temporarily. For some of you that might seem like a dream, right now; the other half of Worsley Times readers might completely disagree.  Either way, it’s less drastic than it might initially seem. Intercalation is an optional part of almost every Medicine course, giving the opportunity to study for another year, and improve experiences of research or other, specialist parts of medicine. Socially, it offers a slower pace for a more enjoyable university experience (read: the chance to make it to every Wednesday in Popworld), or even to live in another city. These advantages are undeniable, but so too are the extra student loans, extra year of NHS bursary instead of student finance, and the reality that the degree you obtain will now have no impact on your foundation role or location. 

So, the alternative: a sabbatical/temporary leave/gap yah. A year to do what you want to do, in the real world, beyond the security and/or confines of university. Having emailed my heads of year with a letter explaining why I wanted the time, a progress committee accepted,  and gave me that free year: no mandatory reflections, no assessors, and no presentation or justification of it all once I got back.  I met amazing people, learned languages, got Giardia, and looking back, had probably the best year of my life. Though not my focus, I did do some medical things in different places, and I could also make a good case for it being the year in which I developed most as a medical student, but this would undermine my point. At the risk of moralising, or simply sounding like a bit of a knob, life is not only about becoming the best doctor possible.

Also, money. That you should have, or save up, all the money to support yourself in a year away from uni, and facilitate whatever you want to do, is not an expectation of the university’s progress committee. Working to save the money that you’re then going to use to realise your plans is a completely valid way to spend time in that year. Similarly, volunteering and organisations like Workaway give you the chance to trade time and work to live for free, seeing what life’s really like in almost any given place. Finances will never be the same for everyone, but this year was objectively less expensive than a year in Leeds, making all a potential option even for those who are limited by money. Of course, for some people this might still not be a possibility, and going straight into 5th year will always be right and/or necessary for some people. 

Having come back and caught up with friends who had intercalated or gone straight through, at least initially it seems that everyone has had good years. The 5th years are itching to get it all over with, and the intercalators are proud of what they accomplished; maybe my year would’ve been better here? It’s said that all our choices are half chance, and taking a year away from it all isn’t a guarantee of anything, but it is an option.