Stitch Marker Giveaway & Prospective Job Pondering

Good morning!

This fortnight, the lovely Corrie of Plutonium Muffin Podcast is running a giveaway for a set of my stitch markers.  To enter, you pop on over to my shop here to see which set if your favourite, and post that along with your email address or ravelry username on Corries blog post here.  The giveaway closes at 5pm GMT on 31st of May.  

I'm having quite an exciting day myself, because I just received a phone call letting me know I've been short-listed for a medical teaching job which I'm very keen on.   The interview isn't for two weeks, but I know you'll all be crossing your fingers for me until then :D.

Our job track is always set out in segments, which last a set amount of time.  For example, everyone starts on a two year 'Foundation Year' track, which involves six 4 month placements, spread across medical and surgical specialties.  After this you need to re-apply for the next segment.

It's a little bit of a pain a lot of the time, for example - we are technically on a series of temporary 4 month placements, due to this estate agents don't recognise that we have a permanent job & we needed my partners mum to be a guarantor for our rental flat last year.

(Just to clarify, because I understand I don't usually talk about work - I'm a doctor, have been for two years since graduating at Edinburgh University with a medical degree in 2013). 

I'm now finished the two foundation years & am in the process of applying for the next segment.  This is where it gets overly complicated, and competitive!  You can choose from several 'core training' tracks, which are very general; e.g. medicine or surgery.  If you know what you want to do, you can start down a specialty track instead - obstetrics, psychiatry, A&E, many more.  

Some specialities can be reached via more than one track, some are more competitive than others either due to the work/life balance it provides or due to the reputation of a speciality.  Similarly, location heavily influences how competitive a post will be - is it a large teaching hospital with lots of support and opportunities for research?  If so, this will be more desirable than being left to your own devices in a district general. 

Personally, I've applied to core medical training, which will be one of 50 jobs spread throughout the west of Scotland, anywhere between Glasgow down to Dumfries.  I'm crossing my fingers that they won't post me too far away from my flat in the West End of Glasgow, because I really don't want to live in temporary accommodation :/.  

The job I mentioned above is a single clinical teaching post based near Glasgow, which involves working out of hours shifts in hospitals when not teaching undergraduate medical students from the university and junior doctors from the hospitals.  I'm very keen on teaching, so it would be wonderful to be able to apply myself to that for a year!  There's a real sense of accomplishment when you get to the end of a tutorial & know people understand more than they arrived with - and if they don't?  That's your challenge - to work out what they don't understand, what base knowledge they need to understand the next part, why it isn't making sense & if you can change the mode of delivery or approach to the topic in order to better facilitate learning of this particular subject to this particular group.  It's a dynamic process of mutual understanding which won't work if either the teacher or the student isn't engaged, and it's also a good tutors job to get everyone engaged in the first place!  Also, it really helps me consolidate my own learning when I teach.

I'm sure if I don't get this job you'll all know due to the vast amounts of twitter grumbling that'll be going on next month.  If I go in and say all of that, will they give me the job please?

Now I've built it all up.  Crumbs.