In the Wars by Waheed Arian

Author:Waheed Arian [Arian, Dr Waheed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473582620
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2021-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

11

Belonging

AS THE YEAR WORE on my grades started to dip. Instead of the predicted firsts or 2:1s I was getting thirds. This plunged me into a state of extreme anxiety and had my tutors scratching their heads and wondering if they had got me all wrong. Although I doubt I had stood out on the basis of the entrance exam, I learned later that, on the strength of my interview, I had been rated among the top five of the forty or fifty applicants considered. As I had discovered, the interviews were not designed to produce pat answers but to reveal your ability to think and solve problems. So the staff couldn’t understand what was happening now, especially when I was doing so well in tutorials, which confirmed to them that I belonged on the course and had the aptitude to handle it. And I could handle everything orally. It was in written work in exam settings that my performance was taking a dive.

I had a better idea than my tutors about why things were going wrong, if not precisely how. I had passed all my previous exams with flying colours through sheer effort and hard work, but at this level my lack of fundamental education was being exposed. In addition to the language problem, I had never been mentored in exam technique. Multiple-choice questions were new to me, as was negative marking, whereby you have marks deducted for a wrong answer, which means that if you don’t know the answer, you are better off not addressing the question at all and settling for zero.

My tutors would have been only vaguely aware of my background. The details I had disclosed in writing on various forms and applications would have been sitting in a file somewhere in the admissions office, but they were not something I discussed with my teachers. On my UCAS form I’d had to take one or two liberties with the truth on the question of my secondary schooling and the extent to which I was self-taught, and I lived in constant fear that if the inadequacy of my formal education was exposed I would be ‘sent down’. In other words, thrown out.

It was this fear that underpinned my reluctance to open up about my history, along with the stigma attached to anyone perceived to be struggling academically. However sympathetic our tutors, no medical student was prepared to admit to that. We were all highly competitive: you had to be to have won a place at Cambridge, or indeed any medical school, in the first place. I wouldn’t have been the only one to have been feeling the strain. Students who were used to being top of the class had arrived to find that, for the first time in their lives, they were not, and that is a hard adjustment to make.

My mental state was working against me. I shut myself away to prepare for exams and wouldn’t speak to anyone on the phone for two or three weeks except Khalid, not even my parents.

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