Exploring opportunities for Research Exchanges in UK Medical Schools
Written by Jonny Currie, about 1 year ago | Permalink
Help Medsin set up Research Exchanges for the UK!
Some Medsin members are looking to find out whether IFMSA Research Exchanges could be established in the UK. You can find out more about these here.
Here's a message from Taavi Tillman, student at Glasgow, of what they are and what he'd like to do after attending the recent IFMSA March Meeting in Thailand:
"IFMSA’s Research Exchanges provide an opportunity for students to undertake 1:1 swap of what we would call a self-proposed pre-clinical SSCs (Student Selected Component). To date, none have been set up in the UK though the IFMSA, and I did not find out why. Most countries would like to send someone to the UK for an SSC, but to enable that we need to send a UK student to them. Many medical students have undertaken self-proposed SSCs abroad outside the IFMSA, so setting up official IFMSA exchanges in the future seems to be feasible to me. The good news is that the IFMSA already has a large number of projects set up with professors waiting to receive UK students. What we need to do next is collecting data on which UK medical schools allow their students to undertake self-proposed pre-clinical SSCs outside their home university.
I would see great benefit from a national UK database, which displays details of all the previous self-proposed SSCs that students have created. Currently, some UK universities do have an internal database for students can browse, but I fail to see why this information is not shared with other universities. Increased inter-university of inter-national research exchanges would increase the likelihood that a student will find a field that interests them, or a department whose staff share the student’s mindset. More of such “good matches” means that more students will want to go into academic medicine.”
We hope to make findings available on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MedicalschoolintheUnited_Kingdom.
How to help
Below is a form for you to complete with details of your university or medical school's policy on student-selected components (SSCs, also called SSMs). Fill in the form using your knowledge or previous experience at your medical school and depending on the feedback we'll know if research exchanges are a viable activity for Medsin-UK to begin running!
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