Phase One - week one! Thought of the day.....90% of our DNA matches that of a banana!

Bloody hell! It is day two of the course and there is so much work to do already.

Yesterday we had two modules: Biological molecules in the morning and clinical skills in the afternoon. Both were very good and I am SO glad that I have just done the years of chemistry, because I would absolutely have a real struggle on my hands without it. We never did any chemistry as a student nurse and in one three hour session yesterday, we touched on loads of principles from the AS chemistry course.

First note to any nurses thinking of doing medicine = go and do a chemistry course - I would recommend AS level at least .

The clinical skills session was on examination of the cardio vascular system and was an introduction to basic clinical skills - all good stuff. My nursing covered perhaps 50% of it but there was plenty of new stuff such as listening to the apex beat and other heart sounds that will be completely new to me.

Day two, we had genetics all morning and Health Psychology all afternoon. The genetics is going to be, erm.. challenging to me because it is all new, but the psychology was pretty much what I have spent the past ten years doing.

I am living in a really nice hall which is 100% improvement on last week. It is small but clean and now i have my internet and TV set up, I am fine. It is costing me around £3700 per year which includes food.

I am not as homesick this week but still feel like I have wandered in to an 18-30 holiday and am waiting to go back home and get back to normal. It is only today that I am starting to feel like a medical student - last week I felt like an intruder who had crept in to the back of class. It is a massive, massive change for me and I am giving myself time to settle down. The one thing that is crystal clear is that the pace of work is so fast that I need to work for a good few hours each night, right from the beginning. I remember starting my nurse course and having to give a 2,000 word essay in after three months on the course. With this course, I have at least 6 exams in 12 weeks time and need to pass all (They only allow you to fail one module in the whole year in order to go to year two. If you fail more than one module, you have to sit a qualifying exam in the summer which looks horrendously stressful)