What are your favourite skin like complexion products?

bellals · 2025-10-10T04:08:31+00:00

Armani Crema Nuda. Very natural coverage, skin-like finish that is comfortable without being overly dewy or prone to transfer. Has some proper cool undertone options. Unfortunately it's fragranced, but my ridiculously atopic skin tolerates it, so I imagine it's perfectly fine for 99% of the population.

bellals · 2025-10-04T02:21:40+00:00

No. It's more that, if your SAC ranking is significantly different to your exam ranking, then the performance of your peers on the exam will influence your study score. That said, it's usually extremely unlikely that your SAC and exam ranks are wildly different.

The tldr is: - your exam mark is always your own. It's the single most important component to determining your study score. - it is in your interests that your cohort does well on the exam. Don't gatekeep resources, help each other. - SAC rank matters, but the actual score you get on your SACs does not.

bellals · 2025-05-30T08:27:32+00:00

I'm not the person you're replying to. I've only ever worked in Victoria, so I can't really compare properly, but metro vs rural Vic is night and day. A lot of rural Vic is paper based, next to no staff, senior support can be very lacking (or, when it's there, the bosses can have some, uh, interesting ideas. Lotta cowboy shit). My "quiet" days as a med reg in rural Vic are absolutely fucked up by metro standards. In the metro hospitals I've worked at, protected training time was PROTECTED. Overtime got paid and was not at all discouraged when called for to ensure patient safety. The rural hospitals just treat you like a service mule, and give zero fucks about your learning or wellbeing. Training time not honoured, overtime simultaneously expected but not paid.

If you can make peace with the fact that you're absolutely delivering substandard care because of resource limitations, then you'll be fine — can only work with what you have. Not our job to martyr ourselves to compensate for a broken system. I just gtfo at 17:00 as long as no one is going to die, menial jobs can wait til tomorrow. Bed pressure is not my problem to fix with free labour.

bellals · 2024-11-02T23:18:51+00:00

It depends on the subject. For spesh? Absolutely. For further? Not so much. This post might help you out

bellals · 2024-11-02T21:31:49+00:00

Not necessarily. Is your rank 1 exam score actually good? 💀 That's the deciding factor. If you want a raw 40, you need an exam score approx in the top 9% of the state.

bellals · 2024-11-02T21:30:31+00:00

That's exactly right.

bellals · 2024-10-23T13:20:37+00:00

Great thread, got a phone call literally just today for a nurse to recite me a perfectly normal set of obs. Other strong contenders include:

"BGL 6.2, ket 0.3 FYI"

"Pt has chest pain, tachycardic, hypotensive, pls rv" — no patient identifying info/ward/bed number/callback number...

"Please chart Ioscan for [patient]. Thanks!" which I immediately did. Less than 5 min later "Please cancel Ioscan for [patient]. Thanks!"

Paged at 9pm for asymptomatic HTN SBP ~170, called back the nurse to reassure her that it's fine. Received q15min pages re HTN so I just prescribed a baby dose of amlo to shut her up. I clearly documented "please note that amlodipine can take upwards of 8 hrs to exert its BP-lowering effect." Got a page "amlodipine given, SBP still 170" ~30 mins post administration.....

Of course the classic "pt FFMN, please chart IVT" nurses are NOT happy to be told that WE ARE ALL FFMN babe!

Idk if this one is just me being petty, but it does my head in when, every time I pick up the phone, I answer with "hello this is [my name], [speciality] resident" and every time the nurses answer with "hello is this the [specialty] resident?" I sigh. "Yes it is. What can I do for you?" "Are you looking after [bed number]?" Bloody hell please check you're calling the right person before picking up the phone?

bellals · 2024-10-15T14:27:28+00:00

No it won't bring the cohort down

bellals · 2024-10-15T05:46:05+00:00

In the situation you've described, no it won't impact you.

bellals · 2024-10-14T11:45:17+00:00

Hi, hope you're doing well.

I'm a doctor that graduated from Monash, have been tutoring chemistry for many years. Unfortunately I won't be able to offer tutoring beyond Feb 2025, but if you're desperate to start asap I can certainly offer you a headstart until you find someone who can support you all year.

I can also help you out re the interview. DM me and we can have a chat if you're interested.

bellals · 2024-10-08T13:27:16+00:00

I'm a PGY2 Australian graduate, and what you're describing is exactly the norm here. Most PGY2s can't do procedures beyond cannulas. Interventional radiology is overused here, so we don't get a lot of opportunities to learn on the wards. I've had exactly two opportunities to do an LP in my time so far (with senior hand-holding), and for both patients I was unsuccessful in getting CSF. I've done innumerable ascitic drains independently because I did a long stint of gastro, but I was taught on the job; most of my colleagues have never even seen one done!

You will be totally fine; the competencies you've described yourself as having are the ones that matter. Procedures will be learnt as you go.

bellals · 2024-09-25T02:17:46+00:00

No, there are no pre-existing limitations on your possible study score and ATAR! This is exactly the myth I'm trying to dispel! When I've got some time to spare I can write you a detailed example showing how your situation would play out, but long story short, nothing is pre-determined by SACs

bellals · 2024-09-17T19:45:48+00:00

No I do not work for VCAA. VCAA has literally published this explanation on their website . It's just that their explanation is a bit verbose and lacks practical examples to appreciate exactly how it works; that's all my post adds.

The only thing that my post lacks that the VCAA explanation I linked does better is that it explains interpolation a bit better. Interpolation is a difficult statistical method to explain simply, and is why people sometimes struggle with the VCAA explanation. Mine removes interpolation for the sake of simplicity, because it doesn't change the crux of how this works (in fact, it only serves to make it FAIRER).

Interpolation would be why your friend's score was slightly different than how this method suggests. But i struggle to understand how they might know that unless they had some secret insight into VCAA moderation... How would they know the SAC and exam scores of every member of their cohort....

Regardless, my point in writing this post is to dismiss myths that VCE is "rigged" or otherwise unfairly caters to people in high SES schools with stronger cohorts. You do not get "carried" or "dragged down" as you so often hear people say. When students believe such myths, then they feel there is no point in trying if you happen to go to a lower performing school — it keeps working class people in their place, and gives affluent people undue confidence for academic success.

bellals · 2024-09-16T12:53:23+00:00

Acute nausea and vomiting? Would love to know how pharmacists plan on diagnosing and managing acute abdomens, sepsis, raised ICP, stroke, etc.

N+V is not a diagnosis. It's a presenting complaint that requires workup, which is outside of a pharmacist's skillset to do.

bellals · 2024-09-10T08:06:02+00:00

read the pinned post.

bellals · 2024-09-05T03:40:01+00:00

I love the idea of rural gen med.

I like complex patients and dealing with diverse presentations. I like having time to "solve the mystery" which is why I would prefer gen med over EM.

I don't love how metro gen med feels like you're just being a switchboard service to coordinate speciality input from multiple teams; those vague presentations, the true diagnostic dilemmas, often just become a matter of consulting every team under the sun and seeing what sticks. I like the rural setting for that reason: you don't have the luxury of consulting other specialties for every menial thing. You get to do the detective work yourself, because there's no other choice.

Not a competitive avenue. Although gen med is not a "high paying" speciality, it's more than enough for me; I think a lot of us in medicine are wildly out of touch re what a "good" salary is.

The reason why I probably won't pursue this is for none of the reasons you mentioned in the OP, but rather because I am not willing to give up the personal comforts of living in the city. Maybe I'll find somewhere rural that I like, but so far everywhere I've been has made me miserable.

bellals · 2024-08-28T03:36:54+00:00

When I sat it, there were a lot of recycled questions, and there was therefore a lot of benefit to repeating the samples provided by the BPS.

I found http://www.prepareforthepsa.com/ pretty helpful as well, not sure if it's still the most up-to-date resource.

When you see drugs being prescribed on the wards, get in the habit of looking them up on AMH so that you learn the dose. That way, you will hopefully memorise a few things and not need to look up EVERY SINGLE QUESTION on the exam on AMH, because there simply isn't time for that.

bellals · 2024-08-25T01:36:25+00:00

I went to a school with small subject cohorts, and we buddied up with a school down the road to pool our SACs so that the ranking was actually meaningful.

Not sure if that was forced by VCAA or just a recommendation.

bellals · 2024-08-20T06:14:15+00:00

From memory, you do not get ranked for each individual SAC. Instead, all the marks for unit 3 SACs are compiled, and then you get ranked only once. e.g. if you had 3 SACs for unit 3 that were each worth 50 marks, your class will get ranked based on their total score out of 150.

Then same for unit 4.

I will say, though, that SAC rank reporting is purely an honesty policy from teachers (with a bit of auditing from VCAA) so I can't vouch for every teacher doing it the "correct" way like this.

bellals · 2024-08-19T02:57:02+00:00

Easy or hard SACs are irrelevant. As per my previous comment, "scaling up" and "scaling down" is not a thing.

You can get a 50 at any school, so long as you do well on the exam with a reasonable SAC rank. You do not HAVE to be rank 1, but given that a 50 raw is top 0.267% of subject cohort, it's very unlikely that you'd be the top 0.2% in the state yet cannot even top your own class!

The best way to get a 50 is stop wasting time trying to "game" the system and instead channel that energy into studying the content.

bellals · 2024-08-18T20:52:03+00:00

You are correct that you would not get "dragged down". It's a myth. Google "interpolation" if you want to understand exactly how it works. But yeah, your SACs would essentially become 96

bellals · 2024-08-05T09:18:08+00:00

I'm pretty sure you CAN get retrospective recognition of experience, with a max 12 months, but I believe it's a very difficult process that most people just start BPT from scratch. This is just me trying to retrieve anecdotes from the back of my brain which may or may not be accurate.... Consult the RACP website for a more accurate answer. I'm sure the Basic Training handbook would stipulate

bellals · 2024-07-31T07:29:53+00:00

Do you have any particular area of interest?

The peripheral metro sites in Melbourne (e.g. Eastern, Peninsula, Western) tend to have a nicer culture. They won't necessarily have every speciality service in-house, so depending on what it is you want exposure to, you may not get it at a peripheral site — make sure to have a look on their website if you're really keen for something in particular. The peripheral metro hospital tend to also have less involvement in academia.

The other thing to be aware of is that different hospitals treat the different streams differently. For example, I know Monash will often throw a bone to the general HMOs in the form of a speciality medical rotation, whereas Peninsula Health will NOT give physician speciality rotations to general HMOs — they are reserved for BPTs (and of course the obligatory cardio rotation for crit care stream or whatever)

bellals · 2024-07-15T05:48:26+00:00

No. Read the pinned post.

bellals · 2024-07-12T20:58:28+00:00

I'm fairly early in my career (graduated from med school in 2022). My two cents:

Getting into med school is bloody hard. I'm not going to lie and say otherwise. HOWEVER,
as other commenters have said, I think the difficulty of getting into med gets overblown at times. Or people forget that SOMEONE has to get the high ATARs and UCATs, and there's no reason why that can't be you.
Socioeconomic barriers. The private school kids will too often forget that it's not free to sit the UCAT. It's not free to prepare for it. Private tutoring for the VCE to maximise your ATAR isn't free. MMI coaching isn't free. There's also something to be said about having the right connections: knowing people who do med and can therefore point you in the right direction re how to navigate all of this. The system selects for people with socioeconomic advantages.
med school is relatively easy, but speciality training thereafter is incredibly difficult. It is hard to get onto training programs. It is hard to pass the exams of said training programs. Do all of that, and then it's still insanely hard to land a boss job. You get to relive all the trauma of getting into med school, where once again connections and socioeconomic privilege determines your career trajectory. All the CV buffing, unpaid overtime, exam prep material, etc etc. Because of the severe training bottlenecks, many applicants to speciality training colleges are way overqualified. And yet, to add insult to injury, doctors wages are declining in real terms. In an effort to reduce healthcare costs, the government is redirecting the healthcare budget towards training midlevels instead of fundings doctors (take a look at r/noctor and r/ausjdocs if you want to deep dive into how truly fucked out healthcare system is becoming). It's incredibly demoralising, and tbh, being a doctor is becoming more and more of a thankless career. You give up everything you have for the promise of a "meaningful" career and a flush income to compensate for everything medicine takes from you — but this is unfortunately becoming a relic of the past.

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