Dr Renshaw started by telling us her medical journey; she attended Cambridge university and then moved to UCl to study medicine. After her studies she started working in Tel Aviv where she was an attending general surgeon. She has also worked at St. Marks Hospital, and taught Anatomy in king college.
We then all discussed why we wanted to study medicine, and we’re able to ask her questions about the realistic journey of medicine. Many interesting questions were asked such as how would being a religious Jew affect one’s career, and would you be able to not work on a chag. Another very interesting question asked was, how do you deal with the fact that you may have made mistakes that risked someone’s life? she of course explained that is a very tough part of the job and that we all therefore need to be very emotionally capable to be able to study medicine and that mistakes are always a part of the career.
Personally, I thought that Dr Renshaw was amazingly useful to all of us, as we were able to really get a true insight about the cons of medicine. She discussed how managing time with her family is very difficult due to the intensity of the job and many other struggles that she deals with on a day-to-day basis. The opportunity to get a real picture of what medical studies and the career that follows it was truly amazing and to me opened my eyes a lot more, even though we talked a lot about the negative side of the career, I became even more interested in the field- she explained that it is a career of life-long learning, which is something I am very excited for.
