My experience of Intercalating in Anatomy at King’s College London
To Intercalate or Not to intercalate? That is the question that almost every medical student is confronted with at least once in their studies. If you really enjoyed a module at university, and wished you had more time to delve into it, this is the perfect opportunity to explore the area in more depth. In the mean-time you get the chance to develop a whole host of new skills, take some time out from medicine and potentially publish a paper – not to mention attaining the few small letters iBSc after your name. However, intercalating is not for everyone, so it is important to consider it carefully before you dive in.
For some medical schools, the intercalated degree is a compulsory part of the course. Meanwhile for others you can choose to intercalate at certain points in the medical programme – normally after your second, third or fourth year at the university. As a medical student at King’s College London, I chose to intercalate after my second year in Anatomy. This was primarily because of the quality of Anatomy teaching at KCL, which offers whole body dissection, and strong instruction from eminent professors such as Harold Ellis and Alistair Hunter. With the opportunity to complete dissection projects and modules specifically geared towards budding surgeons, my intercalated degree programme was extremely popular, and welcomed many students from other universities as well as King’s. However, I know that many of my colleagues chose to study at different universities to get a new student experience, or in completely different areas such as journalism, law and medical history.
My experience of intercalating in Anatomy at King’s College London
When you are choosing an intercalated degree, it is important to consider several different factors, most important of which being which subject you choose to study. After all, you will be studying it for a year, so it is important that you enjoy it! It’s also wise to consider where you want to study (the same university/ campus/ city) and to look at the programmes on offer. Intercalated degrees can vary significantly in terms of intensity, structure (practical/lecture/coursework ratios) and contact time, so it is important that you check that you have a good match before you commit to a course.
Talking from experience, the flexibility of the Anatomy course at King’s was incredible, with the opportunity to choose from most third year modules at the University, so long as a given number of credits were delivered solely by the Anatomy Department and included a library/lab/data collection project. Many of my colleagues also found this to be the case in a number of other intercalated degrees run at the University, such as Physiology – but this did vary depending on the course, with Endocrinology degrees having a much more rigid structure with fewer optional modules. Even within Anatomy, whilst there was a significant degree of choice about what you studied, some modules were more popular for others, with the surgical based modules filling up the fastest with reduced availability compared to other modules. Therefore, it was important to check module availability before committing to the intercalated course to make sure you got onto modules you liked for the year.
Compared to preclinical medicine, studying over my intercalated year was by no means a “walk in the park”: I often felt out of my depth, with a cohort of students who had already been studying the subject for two years straight. However, after a year I walked away with an improved understanding of how to present (an important skill on ward rounds and in conferences), read scientific papers, and research. I also felt much more prepared for clinical medicine, what I wanted to specialise in in the future, and fully ready to “jump back into” my medical course.
Why should I take an intercalated degree?
To act as a useful entry into academic medicine: often you have the opportunity to complete a lab project, and get a published paper in your year out. This can look extremely good on your portfolio when applying for foundation posts, with intercalating counting for up to four extra points on the Foundation Programme Application system, and two extra for published papers. It also means that you can apply to study for a PhD later on in your medical career. (https://www.bma.org.uk/connecting-doctors/community_focus/b/student_opinion/posts/to-intercalate-or-not-to-intercalate)
Devote some time to an area you are passionate about studying: you will hear lectures from world leaders in their field, and be on the forefront of cutting-edge research. If you love a particular area, you will have the chance to read about it in more depth and really develop a finer understanding of a subject in a lot more detail.
To make friends outside of medicine and engage in some extracurricular activities. The medical course can often be packed, giving little time to develop hobbies outside of medicine. With the course structure of an intercalated degree, you often have more time to devote to extracurricular pursuits and to develop a new hobby: good for you and your CV.
As a break away from clinical medicine.
Problems with intercalating
Adding an additional year to your medical degree will incur significant financial costs in terms of living and tuition fees. Student loans company will cover it, but it is one extra cost on top of the already enormous student debt. It is therefore important to check out the living costs in the area you wish to study at, and plan out your costs in advance.
Some courses may not offer the modules you want to study, or when you apply, they will tell you that the modules are full and offer you modules you are not happy with. It is therefore extremely important to research all of the options in advance of starting to make sure you get onto the course you thought you signed up to.
When you rejoin your medicine course, you will be joining the cohort in the year below you. You will have also forgotten some vital preclinical information, and so you might initially feel behind when you rejoin the medical programme.
Things I wish I knew before I intercalated.
Intercalating is nothing like preclinical medicine – as an intercalated degree is basically the final year of a bioscience/ BA course, you will not be “spoon-fed” and there is an expectation that most of the time will be spent researching. To gain a first, you must do further reading, and a lot of it. That’s why they say you “read” a subject at University, as most of the time, the intercalated year is spent conducting further reading and research rather than sitting in lecture.
Modules vary a lot. In Anatomy at KCL, modules varied in difficulty, amount of coursework and exam structure. Depending on the University and the module, you may not be tested on everything in the final exam. After medicine, this was a big shock to me, and I was taught to revise “smart”, instead of revise everything. Often in modules we were told that only eight areas would be tested out of say 13 areas we had studied, and of these we would only have to answer a choice of two questions. By doing the maths, we realised that it was much better to study fewer subjects in more depth with further reading, than study them all in less depth and be unprepared for the exam.
You will feel like you have been thrown into the deep end at the beginning – this is normal, because you are joining bioscience/ BA students who have already devoted two years of their life studying a subject that you are only just studying in their final year. They might have covered areas you have not even touched upon on your medical course, and so you might find yourself in a lecture which goes over your head but they all understand. The key point here is to not panic. You may have covered areas they haven’t, and even if this topic is completely new to you, you will be able to catch up with some further reading. Even better, finding out concepts for yourself will help you to cement the principles firmly in your mind, and should help you come exam time.
Will it affect your medical studies?
According to a recent report, intercalating can actually improve your overall academic performance. In a study of 154 intercalating medical students at the University of Aberdeen, completion of an intercalated degree was strongly correlated with high attainment in the 4th and 5th years of the MBChB course. (https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1472-6920-9-24). Meanwhile, in a further report by Mahesan et al, it was also revealed that doing an intercalated degree increases your chances of getting your preferred foundation school posts (https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1472-6920-11-76). However, it is important to remember that intercalating involves taking a year out of medical studies so you will want to dust off the textbooks before you get back!
