Fran's Blog (& rants)

So (hopefully) I’ll be taking a Gap Year next year while I reapply to medical school. I know its not common in america but the the UK the majority don’t but a significant number do. When I first realised I’d have to take one I was somewhat annoyed. Medical school takes 5 years minimum, 6 years if I choose to intercalate a BSc and I’m going to be 20 before I even start. And that’s even if I get IN. If I don’t I’ll have to do a degree and then post grad medicine (which is only 4 years) but with a gap year thats 8 years.

But then I started looking around and I realised the amount of opportunities I’m going to get from this. When else to you have a year free in you’re life and don’t have a job/don’t have to pay bills etc. 

So while I’ve been thinking about it I’ve come up with a short list of things I want to accomplish on my year out:

• Volunteer and the London 2012 Paralympic Games
• Learn and get good at photography
• Learn and get good at cooking
• Either learn swedish or relearn spanish
• Travel around the USA by road
• Go to Africa/Fiji (haven’t quite decided yet) to volunteer in a hospital/clinic
• Go and tour china
• Get my first ever job and earn my own money
• Live on my own for the first time (when no one is renting my Dad’s apartment)
• Do the 50 books challenge
• Have a proper stab at Nanowrimo
• Start vlogging and stop putting it off!
• Set up a fashion/beauty blog

I’ll add more to this list as I think about them- I’m sure this list will be more than twice as long when I actually begin my Gap Year

My dad sent me this… kinda scary the whole the US is in right now…

This might help understand the current Federal budget problem. Big numbers are tough to get a handle on.

This should help:

Why S&P downgraded - this puts it in perspective… • U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000 • Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000 • New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000 • National debt: $14,271,000,000,000 • Recent budget cut: $ 38,500,000,000

Let’s remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget: • Annual family income: $21,700 • Money the family spent: $38,200 • New debt on the credit card: $16,500 • Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710 • Total budget cuts: $385

Whenever people complain about youtubers using their fame and popularity to make money from selling I get a bit annoyed

musicians use their fame and popularity to sell their music and merchandise to make them money

as do authors

and artists

and actors

and directors

pretty much anyone who is famous makes money off of their fans

what’s wrong with youtubers doing the same??

You know what annoys me? When people blame the recession completely on Labour…

Most people would agree that the banks played a pretty big part in the recession with the whole financial crisis…

Most people agree that this was down to the banks being deregulated…

But everyone freely ignores that it was a CONSERVATIVE government that deregulated the banks!

Yes I know that there were other factors aswell but this was the first recession in the UK under a labour government… we’ve had many more under the conservatives…

It astonishes me how short some people’s memories are sometimes.

In my AS mocks I got an E with 44% for Core 2

We did another mock just over a week ago (with 3 weeks till the real thing) and I got a U with 33%…oops

needless to say with a fail I decided to spend a day revising it.

I just got a B with 72% and then an A with 83%

I AM EXTREMELY HAPPY RIGHT NOW XD

When I was choosing my secondary school, the choice was really just between two schools. They were both really nice in my opinion but my mum clearly preferred one and wanted me and my sister to go there. All she ever said was talk about how nice the school she liked was and make negative comments about the other one. Looking back on it she was trying very hard consciously to make sure we chose the school she wanted us to go to even though she told us and everyone else that we chose by ourself. And it worked, but we were 11, it was always going to.

But now I’m looking at universities, and she’s trying to do the same thing again. The thing is, I’m 17 and will be 18 in the summer, if she thinks she can do it again and I’ll flow with it she’d be very wrong.

So far I have looked around 2, Cardiff and Queen Mary in London. I loved both but I definitely preferred Queen Mary. My mum came with me to Cardiff and my Dad came with me to Queen Mary so she hasn’t seen it. However, she keeps making negative comments about it and positive comments about Cardiff. She also keeps asking questions to try and get a negative answer about Queen Mary, the only negative thing though is that its not in a great area, but this doesn’t really bother me as its a 25min tube ride to Central London so who cares? 

She was on the phone to her sister last night and this is where I really noticed as she didn’t think I was listening. She listed off the places that my sister was looking round (Bath, Exeter, York, Durham, Birmingham) and then went ‘all really nice places’ to her sister. She was then blatantly asked where I was looking round and she listen them off but put two I’m not even looking round first when listing them off (they were two I thought about but not so sure about now) she then missed sheffield off the list (she doesn’t want me to go there because all my dad’s family either went to uni, polytechnic or teacher training there). She then started going on about open days and how I loved cardiff and it was such an easy drive and really close to the city centre and all that stuff and then started taking about queen mary but said the area wasn’t very nice so I’m not too sure about it. Complete and utter lies.

My mum thinks she will be able to steer my decision again but the thing is, since I’ve noticed I’m probably more likely to do the opposite. I hate the way she can’t support my decisions, all she will do is criticise them. (You don’t want to hear the amount of times she has criticised sheffield and newcastle which are currently two of my favourites).

So at my school, it might be the same in all schools it might not, there’s a lot of ‘I need to lose weight’ responded to with ‘no you don’t’.

I’m not going to be one of those girls that says they *need* to lose weight, I don’t, but I want to. The moment you tell anyone that at my school they start thinking you’re anorexic, and I’m not, spend a day with me, I eat.

The thing is about 8 months ago now I went on the pill, not for *that* reason, but because of a medical reason and the fact I wanted an easy way to get rid of my acne without having to buy expensive proactiv solution which worked but was extremely expensive. I started of on one and I was quite happy because I’d heard you gained loads of weight but my acne was the worst it had ever been so I changed. This one has made my acne go away, my scars are still in the process of disappearing but my face is no longer ‘a mountain range’. Whats annoying though is I gained a lot of weight.

I mean I’m not overweight, when I calculate my BMI I am still perfectly normal, I would’ve needed to gain a hell of a lot more to have been classed as overweight. But thinking that you’ve gained weight kind of knocks your confidence a bit. Especially as all my fat goes to my belly I feel like I’ve gained a lot more and I am lot fatter than I actually am.

So when I say I want to lose weight, I just want to get back to what I was before I started the pill, which I don’t think there is anything wrong with, its just annoying that if anyone at my school was to know I would instantly be judged as anorexic. And I’m not.