By Ismail Abaza, Year 12
Med Club is held every week by students in the Stem Center about biology, health and obviously, medicine. I interviewed one of the club’s co-leaders, Leo Mansfield to get his views and opinions on the club. I wanted to see how Med Club has impacted him, why he chose to co-lead it, etc. Leo is a student in Ecolint who is very interested in biology, anatomy and medicine, he has been in this school for many years.
Why did you start co-leading Med Club?
So I started co-leading Med Club because I’m generally interested in medicine and there’s not really a bunch I can do to pursue an interest in medicine at the moment as there aren’t any classes about it. It’s also too general to get into with just research. So I figured I would start co-leading Med Club because it’s a step I can take in the world of medicine. I personally also just find it to be fun because there are loads of people in the club who have a lot of different interests, it’s always nice to get all the different presentations on completely different topics. I find it very interesting, and Med Club is the only way I can start to pursue medicine at this stage. Not only that, but I also started co-leading it, as I feel like Med Club could have died out last year if no one else was willing to host it. I also did it because I want to give other people a chance who are interested in medicine to learn more.
How do you feel about Med Club in its current state? Do you personally enjoy it?
Right now, in its current state, I feel pretty good about it. At the start of the year, I was concerned that we wouldn’t really have enough members, right now we have about 5 people who come to it consistently. I quite enjoy this small group because I was in the Med Club last year, and it was a much bigger group, so it was a lot less organized and there were always more distractions. I am actually quite happy with our group. I personally really enjoy co-leading Med Club, of course every now and then it is a bit stressful when it is my turn to make the presentations. It always happens to coincide with other classes, but I think it’s really worth it. I like our group and I like the things that we talk about, we also have plans to host larger events outside of school with Med Club. I do not know how we could do that, but we really want to. We have good consistent members, we talk about fun things, and the other co-leaders are really nice too.
What’s one thing you would want to change about Med Club?:
If there was one thing I could change, it’s really how actively group members participate. I sometimes also wish that some of the other group members would choose to present. At least for me, it would be even more engaging as we would get all these different perspectives and completely different topics, so that’s the one thing I would change. I would want to change how long we have to host the club every week. We host it in the 20-minute short break, I think it would be nice if it was slightly longer as sometimes it feels a bit rushed. However, it is sometimes nice to have it in a short time as it forces you to be concise and to really just give a general overview without getting too unnecessarily deep into things.
