Navigating through life as a final year student has had its fair share of obstacles and I have been so busy that writing a personal statement wasn’t really a main priority but something simmering in the back of my mind that I should get round to. Well thank goodness for my department having mock interviews complete with a mock application to begin the process. Two weeks ago I finally completed THE PERSONAL STATEMENT and apparently it wasn’t too shabby! The good thing is that now I have a decent one I will just have to tweek it for each specific department’s job description when jobs come up. Some really good advice was to ensure that every point listed on the person specification of the job advertised has been covered and that I included some information about the department and why I want to begin my career there. I also tried to link my personality traits to the core values of the NHS.

I have also got myself on the NHS jobs website to alert me to radiotherapy jobs within the UK. I know most people from my degree will want to stay in London so I figure, although it would be nice to stay in London with my life already set here, realistically to get a job straight after graduating I need to cast the net just that little bit further. I forgot things after 6 weeks not being in a department nevermind a few months. I really don’t want to hang around, so for me the logical decision is to move out of London as hard as it may be to leave behind friends. I have worked hard these past 3 years, I am ready to start the next chapter with my new career!

With the last 3 months of uni to go assignments and assessments are also looming and like normal I have left things a little last minute, my clinical assessment is this week, as is a meeting for my final literature review. I believe it’s time for my infamous time planning complete with wall chart just so I am aware of deadlines. But that will have to wait as like I said I have my clinical assessment this week and I need to be on the ball. A little bit of advice for all you prospective students and 1st and 2nd years… be on the ball with your anatomy, chemo regimes and tolerance doses! Believe me you will love yourself a little bit when it comes down to the wire. Don’t be like me struggling to cram it all in last minute! I have faith in myself that I am a caring individual and that I have the knowledge base but like the feedback from my mock interview reiterated I need to use more specific radiotherapy terminology in answers and I feel this would come with better knowledge around key concepts. So that is what I am focusing on and will have to keep focusing on until I get a job, but realistically throughout my career.

A large proportion of any health care degree is time spent on placement in an NHS or private department setting. This can be a daunting experience regardless of your confidence or background. As a student changing departments a few times a year it can be especially hard fitting in with an established radiotherapy team. As well as trying to remember theory learned at uni and putting it into practice, we have to think about the impression that we are making on both patients and the radiotherapy team. Do we seem helpful? Are we asking enough questions? Are we communicating with patients appropriately?  Do patients feel comfortable around us? Do our colleagues like us?! All of these questions are constantly going through our heads especially in our first placements when everything seems a bit daunting. The thing is, the impression we make on these placements could make a difference as to whether we get employed at the end of our 3 years of hard work so it’s all pretty important and definitely can all feel a bit overwhelming.

My advice to people is work to your strengths and everyone’s are different. For me, my strength lies in my confidence in communicating and relaying information. My academic knowledge is not the best and I don’t pretend to know things that I don’t. I try my hardest to listen when other students are asking questions I never even thought to, and MAKE NOTES! Make notes for everything, even if you think you will remember it tomorrow. I make a conscious effort to chat to patients about their general life but also how they are coping with their treatment. Another way to aid in fitting into a team is finding out about the professionals you are learning from. Sit with them at breaks and for lunch. Yes it’s uncomfortable but push yourself out of your comfort zone. Placement isn’t just about learning the theory it’s about learning how to do the job of a radiographer and that goes far deeper than delivering radiotherapy.

So it’s the Christmas break. Placement and academic study has officially finished for 2016 and it’s the festive season so the last thing on my mind is my holistic care presentation or my review article. I have spent the last 2 weeks doing as much paid work as I could and getting into the festive season with friends, tis the season to be merry and all that! There is one small problem with this…. deadlines aren’t going away and I the longer I go without doing work the harder it is going to be to get back into it. I know this because this is 3rd year, I know by this point what I am like and apparently I work best under pressure so for some reason I seem to leave everything to the last minute. So today I decided to try and get some kind of order and plan for getting this work done and meeting my deadlines. I made a bit of a timetable, I have now broken down what needs to be done and set myself days ahead of time that I am going to set aside to do the work. I need to be honest with myself…. I know that the 4 days I am back home in Northern Ireland for Christmas are out and New Years Eve and day are out too but apart from that all systems will have to be go.

As part of a healthcare degree there is a large component of group work and my holistic care presentation falls under the group work category, so although I may want to leave things to the last minute, that isn’t possible. This is not just about me, I need to think about the rest of my group and ensure that I keep up to date with them. Maybe spending the best part of an hour making this excel spreadsheet of work plans was just procrastination but I think it helps to have a schedule to stick to and time periods to do things. Almost like giving myself that last minute pressure without it actually being last minute. It really can be hard to motivate yourself regardless of how old you are, how much study you have done, how academic you are, or how much free time you have. I am a queen of creating excuses for myself. Today it was the gym, yesterday it was a late night on Sunday and having to work last night. Tomorrow who knows what it will be. What I do know is that I work best at the library as I have less distractions there so getting up early and heading into uni as if I am heading to work for the day works really well for me. And that age old piece of advice to be organised is definitely ringing true. Armed with my spreadsheet, new pukka pad, new pens, folder with dividers and a printout of my presentation and presentation guidelines tomorrow I will be in the library for 9am and will hopefully be making a sizeable dent on what needs to be done (for that module anyway!). After Christmas will come the review article and again I have quite a sizeable amount of work to do for that as procrastination has been the spice of my life since mid November when I last looked at my articles to be reviewed. I will let you guys know how I get on, in the mean time Merry Christmas!!!

So the time finally came to be exiled to a far off land in search of more experience. Maybe I am being slightly dramatic. This month I spent 3 weeks at one of our placement sites at a seaside Essex town. As the commute would have taken me well over 3 hours I decided against a 5am start and opted to book myself in to some hospital accommodation which looked very similar to my student accommodation circa 2004!

My mission was clear, spend 3 weeks here and learn as much as I could about Elekta machines. (There are 2 main types of Linear Accelerators used in radiotherapy and I have been trained using Varian.) I spent Monday to Friday in Essex and traveled back to London at the weekends to work at my glamorous pub job. I can’t say I was particularly looking forward to this 3 week stint but I used ‘more experience’ as my mantra in the weeks leading up. It’s so easy to get comfortable in a base site that you spend a large portion of your placement time at, but with hindsight it’s important to get out of your comfort zone to enhance your learning. I only have positive things to say about my placement in a far off destination! The department was busy so I got to really work on my skill set and get some core competencies signed off and the fact I can now use a different machine is going to make me that little bit more employable when I graduate (I hope?!). The staff at the department were great at integrating me into their team and 2 City graduates from the year above me were also recently employed so it was great to see them with jobs. Again helping me see the light at the end of the tunnel… That could be me next year!

I’m not going to lie it wasn’t all roses. Working in Essex during the week and working in London on weekends was tiring. I also thought I would use my evenings during the week to get some of my assignments started… that didn’t happen. I came back at the end of my 3 weeks pooped with a great knowledge of Netflix! Even with the best of intentions and not many distractions, spending all day in placement trying to take in as much as you can leaves very little brain power to come in and do work in the evenings. So like I said in my last blog, it’s so important to start assignments early.

The hospital also treated more inpatients than other departments I had been to on placement before and I quite often helped the porters go and get patients to bring them down for their radiotherapy. This meant I saw some really sick patients which I’m not going to lie was hard, but I also got to see what other professionals do for our patients, the multi-disciplinary approach that is so prominent in our lectures and learning outcomes. But shout out to the nurses out there. You are truly awesome and the unsung heroes of the medical profession.

I have now finished my placement block for term 1 and have academic (lectures in uni) right up until our Christmas break. It’s weird to think the next time I am in placement will be February and I will only have 4 months left of my degree!!!