Paper Lovestory { a lifestyle blog from a university student about stationery and organisation }: my august 2019

In the UK, junior doctors rotate every August. From August 2019 – August 2020, I decided not to do, what we call, a ‘training job’. This meant that the year did not count towards my future training in whatever specialty I choose (which happens to be urology). This was fine with me and this ‘year out’ was intentional. I applied for a clinical fellow role which had a large educational chunk to it and it was an amazing year. The highlights were the people I met during the year, the projects I got involved in and started personally and just seeing the difference I had made with the things I had done.

I used post-it notes and Avery note tabs to separate out the different sections that were often referenced. By the end, this is what the top of the notebook looked like.

Every week, I would write at least two to-do lists. The one thing with education was I realised how much slower things can be. As someone who likes to see instant results (hence my choice to go into surgical training), I struggled with this a bit initially. However, over time, I began to sit back a bit and let things run their course.

My to-do lists were often long (usually longer than the one below but this was the one which had the fewest points with identifiable/confidential information on it). You can see that I almost used a bullet journal-esque key to denote a completed or cancelled task.

Below, I’ve taken a picture of a project I did outside of this role. I did some reading about renal and ureteric stones and these were the notes I took. Unfortunately, I can’t show you something from the educational side as some of it is still a work in progress or is in the process of (hopefully) being published.

So this was the notebook which got me through a year of many projects and a lot of educational work. What I really loved about the year was how concentrating on things outside of clinical work made me want to go back into training; and how my clinical days made me miss my educational work!

I think it’ll mean that I will always have an element of educational-related activities to my career at every stage and I’m curious to see what the future holds for me in this regard.