Hello everyone!
My name is Fathimah Saqib and I am the Virtual Medical Society Publicity Officer. I am a year 12 student at King Edward VI Handsworth School sixth form and I am an aspiring medic. I am not sure about what speciality I would want to explore after medical school, as like many of you joining, I just want to get into medical school first as this is just the beginning of my journey. However, I do have high aspirations for the future. I am a great believer in high-quality patient care and the rapport built between patient and doctor being the most important part of medicine for me. I learnt this from long-term hospital volunteering and also ‘Observe a GP’ virtual work experience. For this reason, I am very interested in GP, but I am also interested in paediatrics and neurology. As well as those aspirations career-wise, I would also want to educate to helping medical students and medical applicants, the way Medic Mentor is helping me right now!
Before delving deeper into my experiences with Medic Mentor, I would like to share my aims and expectations as the publicity officer. I will be working on the Medic Mentor social media outlets (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc) to post regular updates on upcoming VMS meetings and events, new blog posts and recent news. This will be in an effort to bridge the gap between the WhatsApp group, blog posts and social media in order to ensure everyone receives the correct updates so that you never miss a thing, especially valuable information that could help you with your application or future career in medicine/veterinary/dentistry. I hope, through this, I will be able to help you gain the best experience from the VMS.
I actually found out about Medic Mentor quite recently. In February I attended the National Healthcare Weekend after finding out about this through a school email. At the time my career options were all over the place! I had doubts when it came to medicine. Could I get the grades? Did I have enough time to gather all the different experiences? Would I be able to cope with the pressure? It all seemed pretty daunting and I didn’t know where to start.
However, as I got to know Medic Mentor more, I felt more informed and confident. It wasn’t an impossible career choice as I previously thought, coming from a non-medical background. I joined the Medicine Leadership programme and the meeting was so insightful and enjoyable, removing all my doubtful worries. Currently, I am also on the Awards Programme, campaigning for the COVID-19 mission- relates to my role as a form charity prefect at school- completing an EPQ and doing some more online volunteering. I hope to attend the MM summer school later this year.
The opportunity as the VMS publicity officer, to collaborate with the Medic Mentor team and yourselves will be invaluable because together this amazing platform can guide us to come out the other side of the tunnel as successful medical/veterinary/dentistry students and scholars on the road to becoming doctors/vets/dentists.
I will also be responding to your suggestions or questions so if you want to know more about anything that I have discussed, please post them in the comments section below. I will be replying to them as soon as I can. Finally, I want to end this on a final quote that we need to take inspiration from to make our VMS a success. “I Can Do Things You Cannot, You Can Do Things I Cannot; Together We Can Do Great Things.” – Mother Teresa.
If you would like to communicate with Fathima, please post a comment below and she will reply!