This week we have been having our orientation for the Women and Children’s Health unit, covering the specialities of Paediatrics, Obstetrics and Gynaecology. Paediatrics is to do with children’s health, obstetrics is to do with pregnancy and delivering babies and gynaecology covers the field of conditions affecting the female reproductive system.

I am pretty proud of myself because I managed to attend all the lectures on the first day, which ran from around 0830 to 1630.

I didn’t go today though because I am sick.

Other than that it is pretty much what was expected of orientation week. There was one incident yesterday where two of our exchange students, one from Nottingham and one from Oslo, asked us when they were going to put the lectures up on blackboard (the online learning system we use), as the lectures at their home universities were usually put up online. As locals we just had to explain to them that they would probably never see these lectures again, due to the way things are organised here. One then asked us if there was a list of learning objectives that we had to study for the unit that we would be assessed on. Then we had to explain to them that the faculty don’t like setting a structured curriculum because they feel it will narrow our learning, or some rubbish.

It was good to hear an outside perspective on these things, just to clarify that the status quo here is not something to be considered normal.