Jessica Miller, a first year medical student at the Edinburgh Medical School↗️, shares an inspiring initiative bringing together an Engagement and Inclusivity group. It aims to promote a sense of belonging and a space to enable friendly connections for Year 1 medical students. This post belongs to the Hot topic series: Student Partnership Agreement 2023↗️.
Walking into a new room of students; it’s daunting.
Isn’t it something that we all have to go through when we first start a new course? For many students, when you come to university, it’s often a huge change to your normal daily life. You’re meeting a bunch of students who you’ve never met before, and some of these people will become your best friends and lifelong friends. You’ll end up spending the next couple of years with these people.
So how can we get people to start talking? How can we get people to engage with others that maybe they wouldn’t normally have done so? Here, at the Edinburgh Medical School, we felt that there was a small gap where we didn’t have a place for our class to gather.
Our year is much bigger than any other year that they’ve ever had, and we were bundled into lecture halls where it’s extremely daunting to go up to someone and say, “Hey, I want to talk to you and do you want to be friends?”
What we can and what we did do, was we applied for the Student Partnership Agreement funding and thought it would be a great idea to have a weekly lunch, a place where we could sit down, chill out, have a chat, get to know other people who we may not normally see during class time. We had staff on board. We had students on board. Now, we just waited for the funding to be granted.
We were granted £600 which was more than enough to cover our lunch for the whole entire year. We arranged each week to meet on Fridays between 12-2pm, and we were lucky enough that our timetable was able to accommodate us, and we were able to have good numbers attend each lunch session.
We would have a variety of different topics we would discuss. Sometimes we’d just be chilling out. Sometimes we would talk about more important pressing issues and other times we had study sessions. The staff that were on board obviously helped support us during the sessions as well during the funding application process.
We also had a focus group where it allowed one of our module leads, Dr Fred Pender, to conduct this session to be able to ask questions and to see how he could improve the course for us and see what was the right thing to do.
We would hope to have this more frequently, and perhaps something that could end up being integrated into all years, because fundamentally, getting people together and getting people talking is something that makes us who we are.
Without connections, without friendships, we are just merely people wandering about in our lives. But when we make those connections, and when we make those friendships, those are where great ideas come from.
We had many different ideas about what kind of things we’d like to do and achieve, and a lot of those projects are being worked on. A lot of these opportunities can make a huge difference to who we are. As students and as future doctors, it is important to understand the value of friendship, and how allowing people to have a space to explore and a space that you’re comfortable in, can make a huge difference to our mental health and the way we respond to other people.
All it takes is sometimes just one small idea to turn into a bigger thing, where it can improve people’s lives and make people want to also do more.
When we start at university, it’s important to remember that creating networks and friendships are fundamental in creating your own identity, and we all need a space to cool down.
Jessica Miller
Jessica Miller is a first year medical student who is also a mother of two young children. Jessica has gone through insurmountable challenges in order to return to study medicine, and wants to bridge the gap between students facing adverse challenges and taking up a place at university.
Jessica also attended the INCiTE Summer School↗️organised by The University of Edinburgh in July 2023, and is currently working on a project based in Cambodia to improve the sexual health education and provide support to survivors of sexual abuse. The overarching aim is to get people talking. #Iwon’tbequiet
Follow my journey on Instagram: @thefuturedrjess
