WANNABE INTERN

Week 2

Message to the Pre-Intern: don’t lose hope!

Week 2, for me, was 2 months post-induction. This was when the wait began to sink in. You mean I’ve been home for two whole months?

By now, I was literally chewing on my fingernails. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t scared of getting a space, but I certainly wasn’t confident about any place anymore.

That is when I began to write this book.

Today is the 12th of September and I sit at the dining table in my parents’ house, typing at 11:27pm (because well, I have an editing job to finish up, but mostly because I don’t have to go anywhere tomorrow morning). If I don’t want to, I don’t even have to take a bath tomorrow morning because well, I can stay indoors all day! (I most likely will stay indoors, except for those few minutes when I step out to buy hot akara for my akamu).

I am spent. You know, I have applied to a couple of places now. Let me start with the first:

LS Health Service Commission

At the State Health service commission to which I applied, I felt I had a ‘leg’, a connection, someone who would help me follow the process through. No, let me start from the very beginning. That day, I’d gone (with my father…don’t ask why I went with my father) to submit my documents at a hospital because we knew someone who’d asked us to do that. Turns out the hospital wasn’t recruiting staff till December and that sure felt like a lifetime!

As we departed, my dad suddenly remembered that there was a HSC nearby and so we went there to make enquiries. Turns out the exam was slated for two days from thence. I was flabbergasted (is that even the right word? I care not actually).

Day of First Exam

I remember that day with keen interest. I seemed like a fresher who was just getting into the university, the way I was giddy to go write my first exam. It seemed pretty easy. The interview wasn’t bad either. Result? I wasn’t called. I was shattered.

Today, right now, I totally feel like they sold us a lie. I mean they told us to go to school, and that we’ll be great if we did.

Well, ehm. I’m out of medical school, and I have spent almost all of my years in school, and no, I ain’t there yet.

Wait, maybe they didn’t expressly say that I’ll be great if I went to school, but it was pretty easy to assume so after this terribly long stay in school. That was mostly what encouraged me through school in the first place, but on coming out my eyes have finally cleared.

Take for instance, they guy across the road from my house. I can bet my glasses (-3.0 myopic lenses), that this guy probably doesn’t have more than a secondary school education, or maybe a little bit more than that. Yet, he has found a way to make me salivate every day with the grilled chicken and all other forms of grilled food substances he manages to make, and at any given time of the day! I’m sure he makes quite a tidy amount of money especially from the external contracts he has- one more proof that if you want to make money, school is not really the ‘koko’.

Workbook:

While in school, what did school represent to you?

In retrospect, what does school represent to you?

Have you gone for a couple of exams or interviews? How was the first one/all of them?