Hey everyone!! First of all, I want to thank the CSU cohort and those who have already signed up to donate or had a proxy donor sign up. Your efforts have not gone unnoticed - we are currently ranked number 1 in Australia for percentage of cohort having donated. Remember there is still a number of weeks left to get involved or donate again. Be sure to keep an eye out on the CSU and AMSA Vampire Cup pages for updates, giveaways and more. A great rescource to check out is also the lifeblood website: www.lifeblood.com.au I have had a few questions regarding how to make sure your donation counts to the team - the CSU VC Instagram page has a post on this. As always, feel free to message me or hunt me down on campus if you have any questions. Happy donating! 

Griffith has been everything you can imagine it to be…. Lamborghini’s, great coffee and tonnes of pasta!! The hospital experience has been far better than expected, with the doctors and patients being extremely welcoming of us newcomers. We see our own patients in ED, scrub into complex cases, echo every 2nd patient (cough cough, Dr. Floyd), and wine tour with the JMOs. A normal day for us in Griffith is usually ward rounds in the mornings, followed by paper rounds (code word for coffee), assigning jobs, and spending the rest of your afternoon chasing consultants around or putting in cannulas. Outside of the hospital you can find us busting a move at the area, or carving up the court at badminton every Wednesday. We have beautiful parks, mountain tracks, look outs, walking paths, and lake Wyangan. We’re about to be 1 of 4 universities in town, so there’s always new friends to be made and plenty of fun to be had with the other med students! 

So they dropped the prices to 20 bucks, and it was fully catered. Free food and saving money are two of my biggest priorities as a student let’s be real, so my motivations for going to the AMSA Careers Conference were entirely selfish. Getting a few days off placement, getting road trip snacks and seeing the bustling metropolis of Adelaide all made this trip already worth it. However, when Heidi and I found the room (after wandering around the Adelaide Conference Centre like vagrants for a while) we were welcomed with free sponsor items, local Aboriginal custodians and the excitement of being with over 100 medical students from across the country. Over 2 days, we discovered jobs in medicine we didn’t even know existed. You can go do a fellowship in Medical Administration and run a hospital all the way through to being a paediatric immunologist and treat the ever-rising number of kids with nut allergies and asthma. We heard from a panel of doctors ranging from intern to a badass RFDS emergency army vet who looks after an entire region in SA. Most importantly, social night no. 1 was dress up and dance in a snazzy Adelaide bar, and no. 2 was free drinks and refills provided with a view of the river. Say less.

Wow SydCon was a blast! It was a fun weekend in Sydney that was filled with 2 days of listening to inspiring speakers and 3 social night events. I really enjoyed the talks with key speakers such as Dr Kerry Chant who spoke about Australia’s response to the COVID pandemic, an inspiring talk from retrieval Drs and paramedics, the future of medicine integrating with AI and ways we can better improve patient care and advocate for people from various minority groups. The night events were so fun and it definitely was a great opportunity to meet fellow medical students, party your stresses away… temporarily… and to trauma bond over this thing called medicine. Overall, I would highly recommend this event for people keen to make new connections and to learn about the bigger picture of medicine.