About
Exam Intelligence? What the hell is that?”
Exam Intelligence is a continuation and extension of a blog started in response to the drudgery, boredom and difficulty of studying for the Final Fellowship of the Royal College of Anaesthetists. (The Final FRCA).
Everyone says that this is a sustained six month campaign of putting your backside down on a seat, and reading for anything between 2 and 4 hours a day (total) for six months.
This means not just pulling out all those textbooks you looked at for Primary FRCA revision, but also looking at the last 12-18 months worth of journals (predominantly, but not limited to Anaesthesia, Anesthesia and Analgesia, The British Journal of Anaesthesia, Continuing Eduaction in Anaesthesia, Critical Care and Pain, Le Journal Canadien de l’Anesthesie aka Canadian Journal of Anaesthesia and The British Medical Journal. Also you need to have a working knowledge of guidelines from the AAGBI (Anaesthetists’ Association of Great Britain and Ireland), NICE (the National Institute for Clinical Excellence), the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) and a whole host of other bodies and institutions.
And if that isn’t enough for you, then you also need to know some medicine, some surgery, some orthopaedics, some obstetrics, some oncology, some microbiology and of course anaesthesia and intensive care medicine!
How very dull.
So we decided we would make it a bit more interesting and entertaining for you, as we did for ourselves.
This site has lots of parts to it, which should help getting through the six months less tiresome than it might seem.
If you look up to the right of the page, you will see a series of tabs, with things like Study, Learn, Cook and Play and Home written on them. You can click on these (Not right now, let us explain first! - Ed.) to be taken to the various segments of the site.
Study is the part of the site associated with study tips and tricks, like how to make your working environment better (a real necessity, given the amount of time you will spend reading), how to study more efficiently and effectively, and information on the exam and exam technique.
Learn is the part of the site with actual information relevant to the exam in it. It includes things like links to blog entries with exam-relevant information on this site, mnemonics (which doesn’t just mean smart ways of remembering the cranial nerves or the structures passing through the various fissures and fossae in the base of the skull) and generally fascinating bits of information.
Cook is a very important part of the site! We know how annoying it is to be “in the zone” in the evening, only to realise you are hungry, and have no idea what you’re going to cook, how long it’s going to take and whether you’re going to gain a few kg or not. (Let’s face it, unless you’re really dedicated to your exercise, you probably will with six months of sedentary living!) So here we have a small selection of recipes, some very healthy, some not, but mostly very easy to prepare or with short cooking times. If people are interested we can also offer a “Menu Selector” in the future, where we can put up a suggested weekly menu at the start of the week, with a shopping list to go with it.
Play is the section filled with work distractions, random useless/useful facts, helpful hints on how to keep your partner sweet whilst you revert to “Grumpy Exam Revision Mode” and things not associated with anything else on the site.
Finally, the Home link will take you to the backbone of the site, the E.I. blog, which is where it all happens. If you don’t do anything else, download an RSS Reader (such as NewsFox, if you use Firefox as your internet browser, which we HIGHLY recommend), click on the RSS Feed button and add us to your RSS Feeds, to stay up to date with the latest entries to the blog. We will rotate (randomly, depending on how we feel) through the various different types of post, so there’s always something new to see here. (Well, not always, but on a fairly regular basis, anyway - Ed.)
On the right you will see the RSS Feed Button at the top of the sidebar (click on the button or the link to subscribe to the feed), a ticking clock (just to remind everyone that time is marching on), the BlogRoll which are some blogs we read, and a few other bits, including a rotating link to Amazon, where we buy pretty much all our books and electronics from, and which includes some of our recommendations. Mostly it’s cheaper than anywhere else, they’re pretty quick on delivery, and easy to return things to if it all goes wrong. if you want to buy a book or anything else from them, please click through to our “Amazon Shop”, because we get some money from it, and it costs you nothing extra!
Please leave comments, links, trackbacks, pingbacks and email us if you like what we’re doing/have done! It would be wonderful to know our work is appreciated!
If you want to know more about the people mad enough to spend time writing about these things, please click here, to go to a page About the Authors.
