Post by Radu Polschi

Am I allowed to reflect on older achievements if I haven’t mentioned them yet? 🤔 Oh well. Better late than never. Let’s talk about my Management iBSc at Imperial. This is the first of a two-post story about my journey toward alternative medical careers. And maybe a bonus post later about UCL vs Imperial. Let’s start with the headline: I made the Dean’s List. My best result at university so far, and probably the best academic result I will ever achieve. Which is slightly ironic, because it might mean I am better at management than medicine. 😅 Getting onto the course was already a bit of a journey. As late as the start of second year I was convinced I would intercalate in Surgical Sciences. Six months later I took the risk and applied to Management instead. There are few moments in life when you can clearly see a fork in the road. This was one of them. Before this degree, if you had asked me what a “consultant” was, I would have confidently told you it was the highest grade of doctor in the NHS. I had absolutely no idea there was an entire industry called consulting. 😂 I also knew almost nothing about healthcare management or health economics, even though many of the concepts were things I had already seen in clinical settings, just in a passive and unstructured way. And I knew almost nothing about doctors pursuing alternative careers. When I started considering this course, back before ChatGPT, going to Australia was still the whole rage. Alternative paths were rare and rarely discussed. The year itself was intense. Probably the most physically demanding academic year I have had. Most all-nighters in a single year. Two double all-nighters. And an average of 4 hours and 57 minutes of sleep per night across the year. If someone had told me, “Radu, you could work less, sleep more, but you wouldn’t get Dean’s List,” I probably would have taken that deal. But the truth is I was not chasing a First or Dean’s List. I was just working the way that felt natural to me. Those outcomes were side effects. That year also introduced me to some great people and groups. A special thank you to my dissertation group Michelle Solomon, Aditi Mudgal, Abhinav Sathyamurthy, David Son, Sanay Goyal and our supervisor Jonathan Pinto. Hopefully one day we’ll manage to publish that work... 👀 Next post: my first steps toward the “dark side”.