Course: Access to Medicine
My Story:
Moving away to London and completing the first year of a degree in Anthropology, Morwenna Craze realised she had been pursuing the wrong career path. Volunteering with UNICEF and other medical and global based charities and societies whilst studying at UCL, Morwenna had awoken a desire to follow a career in Medicine.
She said: “I did the IB and Truro College previously, although I covered Biology in my time on the IB, it wasn’t to a high enough level to easily enter a degree in medicine. I then went to UCL for a year, and I did really enjoy it, it was so interesting, throughout that year I was doing work with people like UNICEF and a sort of more medical and global development based charities and societies and through that I kind of knew that I wanted to do medicine. I think I had medicine in the back of my mind but i was just shushing it, and i finally got to a point where i didn’t want to carry on with a degree when i knew that i wanted to do later down the line, so after the first year, I left uni.”
“I wanted to make sure that this decision was the correct one, so I didn’t rush in to anything and gave myself some time to work before returning to education. I worked at Manor Surgery in Redruth for two years, alongside waitressing work and working as a care assistant in a Nursing home. These work experiences helped me so much, you’re learning on the job and you have to think in the moment, you can’t study something before you do it. You just have to throw yourself into it. That was another way of almost testing myself before going into medicine. Can I think on the spot, Do I actually like working under pressure and that sort of thing”.
“Coming back to education was almost like a homecoming. I loved it. I really liked all my subjects at school but I think I have realised that science is where I’m really comfortable and I really thrive in it. I’ve enjoyed going through all those other subjects and learning things I probably wouldn’t pursue on my own.”
“The whole structure of the course I felt was really helpful. Probably because I was with the science students. Their way of assessments is that they have assessments every single week for each subject. It meant that you are constantly checking your knowledge and constantly revising. If you have any questions, you’re going to know about them the week that you are learning it rather than revisiting it a month later and not remembering any of it”.
“I’m very family orientated so I think I didn’t realised how much I struggled being away from my family until I got home and was like oh good you’re all here. I wouldn’t think to go home to visit at the weekend when I lived away, but when I was here I thought, why haven’t I been home”
“In terms of actually making it adult friendly, being in college 3 days a week is great. It would be so difficult if you are working full time and are supporting yourself, that you would have to sacrifice it to go to college. It would have made it so much more difficult. If you had to rely on your parents again it would be so difficult. Having two days a week to work and have an income and also a life outside of education was really nice.”
After completing the course in, Morwenna progressed on to Exeter University to study Medicine.
