School Student
What's surgery like?
Small Events
Skills Workshops
These events are often over-subscribed so make sure you know how much space you have available, and ensure that you have a fair booking system.
- Suture Workshops
- Anatomy Demonstration/ Revision
- CV writing / Portfolio building
Suture Workshops: Suture companies may help with this, they may provide all the equipment you need, or come along and run the whole workshop for you. Alternatively try asking your local hospitals for out of date sutures or seeing if your medical school can provide funds for buying equipment or lend you the equipment.
Anatomy Demonstration/ Revision: These can be a little harder to organise as you need access to dissection rooms - however, your medical schools should be able to help with this, and foundation and core trainees are often keen to help out as it gives them extra teaching credits. Be sure to acknowledge there support in a formal letter for their portfolio.
CV writing / Portfolio building: This a vital skill. The careers department at your university should help you organise this, or try approaching surgeons in your region who regularly appoint staff to posts. This can be included as part of a evening lecture or careers event.
Specialty and Careers Talks
These are quite straight forward to organise. Make sure that you book a suitable space well in advance, decide what you want covered in the session and start inviting speakers as early as possible, most surgeons organise their diaries months in advance.
Keep lecture based sessions to no more than 2 hours otherwise the audience can get restless. Be sure to brief speakers on the time they have to speak and build in time for speakers to overrun, make it clear if the time is to include questions. Don’t try and cram too many talks into 1 session, if necessary run a series of related talks.
Check with speakers what AV needs they have in advance and check with facilities staff that they are easily available. If funds allow talks can be recorded or web streamed to maximize the audience.
Social Events
Don’t underestimate how useful it can be to arrange social activities for your society. Ideally these can be timed to maximize the benefits to all; try organising parties after the exam period is over or arrange a dinner out on the first day back to catch up. It can be nice to open some of these events up to surgeons who support the society but obviously choose the type of social gathering carefully.
Trips out
An easy option of an event for a society is a trip. Depending on the numbers and your location you can arrange to visit a collection or collections for a day or half day. If you approach the museums or hospitals that you want to see you can often arrange a tour or activity to accompany the visit. London has a number of medical museums including our own.
Check if there are costs involved and what can be arranged. The Opportunities in Surgery Team can arrange someone to show you round the Wellcome Pathology Collection and a short teaching session which fits easily into a half day visit or you can call to discuss other requests. Other museums can provide tours and other interactive sessions.
Plan in advance. Check which days are cheapest to travel on (Friday night is not good for trains!) and if you would need overnight accommodation. It may be better to arrange a coach to take a large group somewhere rather than use public transport. Book travel early to minimize costs.
