Tenacity Serves Med Student Well
Tenacity Serves Med Student Well
There's considerable tenacity required to stay the course through medical school. Similarly it takes an enormous amount of stamina - mental and physical - to propel the human frame across 243km of road, rocks and river on the Coast-to-Coast's Longest Day. Putting the two together demonstrates an unusual degree of fortitude and commitment.
But that's exactly what St Bede's old boy, Michael O'Grady, has done this past summer.
O'Grady was the 2006 recipient of the Christchurch Radiology Group (CRG) Tertiary Scholarship, awarded to students going on to tertiary study in a health-related field. Starting with the Health Sciences course at Otago University in 2007, O'Grady made the cut into medical school at the end of his first year.
"It was pretty brutal. You have to do well across the board to be considered for medicine, so there was plenty of hard work."
O'Grady has just begun his third year at Otago, and is enjoying university immensely. "Medicine's been very different to Health Sciences. There's a lot of emphasis on tutorial-based learning , and it's been personalised and relevant from the start."
The pre-clinical course is modular, with students learning aspects of anatomy, physiology and pathology relating to various body systems. Last year also involved learning clinical history taking and physical examination, and included a clinical placement at a rest home one day a week for five weeks.
O'Grady says that was one of the highlights. "I met people with different perspectives on life and great attitudes, like the 94-year-old man who's still getting around and playing golf. As well as that, I really learnt to appreciate the role the carer plays in maintaining people's quality of life."
O'Grady spent last summer working in construction. This year he dedicated his holiday to Coast-to-Coast training. After running, biking and kayaking through the year, he finished the Dunedin marathon in September in a respectable 3hr56. On February 14, he completed the South Island's most famous multisport event in an admirable (THIS SPACE BLANK FOR YOUR TIME!).
With that challenge successfully met, O'Grady's looking forward to the coming university year, and particularly the clinical years to follow. "I'm very grateful for the CRG award. Medicine's an expensive undertaking, and this has really helped reduce some of the financial stress."
