Canadian Divya Viswanathan moved to Australia in January to begin the start of a journey which will allow her to fulfill her dream: to become a doctor.

She is enrolled in the Bachelor of Medicine/Bachelor of Surgery program at the University of Queensland, and after seven months in the program, she shares her thoughts about the program, university and life in Australia. OzTREKK will feature her in a few blog postings over the course of the next few weeks, as she gives a great perspective on studying medicine at the University of Queensland.

“After classes started, I was a bit overwhelmed, the program is quite intense, and it’s not so much the material (which I believe anyone can learn), but more so the volume. In first year they focus on normal – that is learning to recognize and understand all  the systems of the body in a normal state.

Second year focuses on disease states and third and fourth year will be clinical rotations. In addition to lectures, I attend PBL (problem based learning) groups where we sit around a table and go through a case study and come up with differential diagnoses. This is my favorite part of school! You can imagine why, I feel like House when I am at the whiteboard writing down all the possible differential diagnoses for a patient with chest pain and all the potential tests you can order I also have to attend anatomy labs, microbiology labs, physiology labs, as well as clinical coaching (my next favorite – where we learn clinical examination skills) and communication coaching (things like breaking bad news, and how to help families deal with grief). So days tend be 8-5 and homework plies up quickly. Despite the work, I can’t lie, I really enjoy learning medicine and its fascinating to know how much we know, and how much we still have yet to learn in terms of research.

Other than that, life is pretty good, floating by quick, we are in the musculoskeletal block this week. I think so far my favorite system has been cardiac and reproduction (although I have to say the lecture on parturition (delivery) scared 80% of the females in our class from ever attempting to have their own children ). My clinical coaching group had a chance to visit the cardiac department of a private hospital and had a chance to see ECG analysis, echocardiogram, angiogram results, its absolutely fascinating to learn about healthy states and than also get the chance to see diseased states, we also had a chance to interact with patients who suffered from a myocardial infarct and did a cardiac examination, and I really enjoyed that as well. It made me realize quickly that medicine is so much more than just learning these things from a textbook, that’s just half the battle, the other half is being able to work with patients, and cater the experience to them. Each patient was different, despite having the same disease, and although we learnt it in class, you can really see the biopyschosocial model of health come into play when you work with patients, I am definitely looking forward to doing more of that in second year.”

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