winter holiday

I've been pretty busy lately. Most of the time I'm not at home and if I'm at home, I will be busy doing something else. Hence, the lack of updates.

My next semester will be Obstetrics and Gynaecology followed by paediatrics. Some people says that this semester will be a bit tough and there are lots of things to do.

Paediatric will certainly remind me of my AMS. AMS is a year where I had to do a research and my research is about diabetes in paediatric patients. The hospital that I'll be going for my paediatric rotation will be the same hospital for my AMS. I might be able to see my AMS supervisor if she is not busy attending conferences overseas .

Anyway, I hope that I will be enjoying the next semester.

close to the end

Alhamdulillah, my thesis is complete now. Spend a lot of time today waiting for the supervisor's signature via fax. She is at overseas since April. So, all the communications is via email.I will submit the thesis tomorrow but my job is not over yet. Few things need to be done but the biggest obstacle is already over. Relieved.

3 days to go

That is how close the deadline is. The thesis is near to its completion. Few minor points and tweaking have been added. I will be extremely relieved when all of this is over. Although the job is not exactly finish after the deadline since I need to prepare the thesis for publication...

anyway, to those who have exams in another few weeks, good luck and fortunately for us, we don't have exam this time :).

less than a week.

The submission date of the thesis is due this Friday 18th. Expect me to finish it earlier since I need to bind and made 3 copies of the thesis. This one whole year of doing research is almost over :).

The past few months have been quite hectic as I try to finish my data collection and writing the thesis at the same time. And now I have approached the last week of AMS (Advanced Medical Science). After this week, my winter holiday will start to kick in :).

In the same time last year, my life has been quite different. It was the end of Semester 5 and I was preparing to sit for the semester exam. The semester revolves around immune system and all of those nasty germs. Streptococcus, Staph aureus, vancomycin, T-cells, retinoblastoma and other sarcomas......these terms were in my mind at that time. The exam started early; right in the first week of official university exam and ended early too. Those were the days where I have to read medical books and memorize certain concepts and drugs [Starting from next semester, this will be the norm again ;)]

Back to the present time, what I am doing now is completely different. No exams and lectures for one whole year. Just do the research and if you have free time, follow the ward rounds and attend the specialist clinic.

I am not sure which kind of life suits me better. Sitting for semester exams or doing one year of research. The former demand me to study and memorize a lot of stuff and the latter require me to do a lot of literature review and involve writing a looong thesis. Both are stressful life and full of challenges.

Perhaps in this situation, I should follow my fellow comrades. Be a medical student and not a researcher. After all, isn't that what I've been doing in the past few years...

Okay, back to my work again ;).

draft

There are several things that I need to add to my thesis. I have received the reply from my supervisor last week and she said that there are only few things to be improved and overall it is a good writing. Please note that the draft that I sent to her was not the first draft though. It was draft no 3. Currently I am writing draft no 4 which should be the complete version of my thesis. After the completion of 4th draft / complete thesis, I need to write another draft for publication which basically is my draft no 1 and 2 and summary of draft 4.

I need to update my citation / referencese / bibliography since there are inconsistency in the citations. I think this is caused by alteration of Endnote filters in my laptop and I quote medical journals from two sources.

Following my oral presentations, I gained several interesting points from the audience and I will be incorporating their suggestions into my thesis. That is the advantage of presenting your thesis in front of two audiences and to present it before deadline :).

Back to my work for now....

Oral presentation. Done.

Alhamdulillah. My oral presentation is over. I have presented my thesis today in two different audience. The first presentation was in front of fellow AMS students and paediatricians. The questions was moderately easy. I managed to impress them with the size of my study :).

The second presentation was in front of paediatric endocrinologist and the whole staff in my department. I used the same content from the first presentation. The questions this time were harder than the first presentation since they know quite well in my area of research. Alhamdulillah, I managed to answer all of the questions.

Now, only one more thing left before AMS officially over. That is the submission of the thesis due May 18. Less than 3 weeks to go :).

p/s: On another note, the timetable for my next 2 years already out. Need to sort that out too.

updated: Interesting reading here.

Kenapa Mahu Menjadi Doktor?

Ramai yang hantar anak buat perubatan supaya boleh rawat ibu bapa sendiri nanti. Tetapi realitinya, kamu bukan manusia pertama boleh muncul memberikan rawatan jika berlaku apa-apa kepada ibu bapa. Malah ketika di bilik pembedahan dan wad kecemasan, ahli keluarga bukanlah calon terbaik untuk merawat ahli keluarga sendiri. Namanya, profesionalisma”, saya menyambung provokasi.

“Kamu nak tolong suami, isteri dan anak-anak? Rasa saya, suami doktor, isteri doktor dan anak-anak doktorlah yang paling banyak kena berdikari”

Read more

preparation

I have my oral presentation tomorrow. I attend today's presentation by fellow AMS students. The examiner like to ask unexpected questions. Seems a bit scary though. Hopefully all goes well tomorrow...

draft of AMS thesis

Alhamdulillah, I've managed to complete my draft for the thesis. It is still shorter than what it supposed to be. I am already out of idea on increasing the number of words :). Thus, I choose to send it to the supervisor and hopefully will receive feedback ASAP.

I have terrible headache in the past few days of doing extensive literature review. I think I read too many medical journals and the number of references in the draft is 80. But, I read more than that actually....perhaps 200.....

The advantage on writing long assigment is that this provide me a good training for touch typing. I am still not fast enough in typing...

till then...bye

topic sentence

Right now, I'm in the phase of increasing the length of my writing for the project. It will be good if I can write as much as 60-80 pages :). Hopefully it is not that verbose. It took some time for me to write a new paragraph because of the pattern I used so far.

I begin every paragraph with a topic sentence. This phrase refers to a sentence that summarised the whole paragraph. So, the first sentence summarised the whole paragraph and the following sentences explaining the idea. Most of the time, the sentences that followed the topic sentence were quoted from medical journals since I'm very cautious of any form of plagiarism.

To quote something from a medical journal requires extensive literature review (read: need to read a lot of medical journals). I've just realised that my literature review so far has barely meet my own requirement. I am writing and doing the literature review both at the same time. Hence, spends a lot of time in front of the computer.

While writing a new paragraph, I have to ensure that the paragraph fits the whole picture. I mean that it will follows the order and does not seem too chaotic. This is one of the challenges writing a looooong essay.

Ok. Enough of my rant now. Should continue my unfinished task....

writing a thesis

This is the task that occupied me most of the time now. There are few things that I need to improve on my draft. I need to use logistic regression instead of multiple regression for my data. In simple English, I need to redo my data analysis :).

The official date of submitting the thesis is on 18th May but before that, every AMS students need to prepare a full draft by 23rd April to be submitted to their supervisor. That is less than a month from today.

Besides that, I need to prepare for my oral presentation. Hopefully the audience will not ask difficult questions. For that, I need to finish writing the thesis first.

akhirnya siap...

At last, I managed to finish the draft. A lot of changes were made in the result section and I need to rewrote the whole discussion. Changing the result section requires me to recheck all those numbers and calculation. At the moment, I am tired of seeing those numbers again. In statistics, if you change one small figure, it will affect the whole calculation. Chain reaction. I will be waiting for the reply from my supervisor and hopefully, there won't be any major changes required.

draft

My supervisor asked me to send full draft on Tuesday morning. That is yesterday. Thus, I spend most of my time last weekend to write it. A full draft contains all the necessary things of a completed project; abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, conclusion and references. It was quite busy in the past few days. Bear in mind that my supervisor would like to publish this project in a medical journal. It was a tough job to do.

I only managed to complete it by early Tuesday morning. There are literally hundreds of mistakes and non-sense rambling in my writing. If you see me blogging or commenting at other blogs, that indicate I was stuck at writing :). I have no experience in writing an extremely long (my definition of long is something that is more than 5000 words) assignment before and to expect me to write something for publication, that is even more challenging.

This evening, my supervisor send me the edited version of the draft. There are many red marks in it and it requires significant improvement. I have to do additional literature review. Expect me to be extremely busy again. That does not mean I will stop blogging temporarily anyway ;)

p/s: let us pray that Intan can find her thumbdrive.

expanding words

My research is now almost at its end. The dateline to submit the final thesis is on mid of May. That means I have roughly less than 3 months. At the moment, I have typed 3000 words and the word limit is 10000 words. It is bit hard to reach that word limit now. I guess I' not used to it yet. The last time I have to do a written assignment was in semester 3, I think. That is quite a long period indeed and I think my writing skill need to be polished up. It will take sometime to get used to typing.

On the other hand, I have managed to understand the concept behind multiple regression analysis and have finished analysing the data. I just need to confirm this with a statistician in case there is another simpler concept to be used. Epidemiological statistics is a bit weird to understand...relative risk, odd ratio and few type of hypothesis testing, Type 1 error, Type II error, Mann-Whitney test etc....I guess advanced statistics is not something that I like. Fortunately, I just need to use STATA for any analysis :)

additional note: while surfing for t-test, i found this sentence :D

This test was described by W. S. Gossett, who first published it under his regular pseudonym "Student" (although I don't know why he used a pseudonym, perhaps it was a good idea given the pain and suffering this test has caused students ever since).

from here

STATA

STATA is a statistical software commonly used by researcher to analyse their data. I have been using this software since last week. This software is based on command that used word such as 'if' 'or' 'and' etc. Below is the screenshot. I was calculating the incidence rate of my variable of interest. It took me few hours to understand the syntax (the arrangement of command word) and I have to prepare mock database just to ensure that I did the right thing.

There are three things that I need to analyse for my data. I have done 2 and only left with one more. The last one is a bit tough and probably need to refer statistician or medical statistic book.
After I am done with this statistics, I can hopefully finish my thesis within few weeks :). This is afterall, the second last stage in research.

analysing data

I will be finishing my data collection this week and there are few (actually there are so many) patients that I need to catch up with. For my research, I need to see the patients twice for review and at the moment, the numbers of review is not that great. The percentage of loss to follow up is something that I need to discuss with my supervisor and the statistician.

Just to state here, my n₁>500 yet for review, n₂<200. It is something that has been bothering me lately. Anyway, expect me to be busy with all those statistic concepts and writing up the project as well. My supervisor will be going to India for 3 months by end of March. She expects me to give her something that should look like a final draft before that. Hopefully, I will be able to achieve this task...

lack of patients

I have resumed my data collection after taking one-month break but there is one big problem that I never anticipated. I forgot that this time of the year is the main holiday season. Many patients did not come for their consultations and even some of the consultants took their annual leave. It is a bit frustrating for me as a researcher though. My research is primarily interviewing patients and if the patients or the doctor took holiday....my progress will be hampered down. At the moment, my research progress is quite slow. Hopefully this will be normal by February.

p:s/ I wish AMS will be over asap :)

first draft

At first, I'm stuck on what to write for. Writing in an academic style certainly is not my favourite. To make my life easier, I just reviewed certain relevant journals just looking for certain phrases and sentences and later rephrase that into mine B). For the second draft, I might change those paragraph again. At the moment, I could not write a lot yet since I have not finished my data collection but at least I have already made the first step. The first step is always the hardest.

folder

The picture shows the patients record for my research. I arranged all the patients infon according to their surname alphabetically. Despite the folder thickness, I'm far from reaching my objective. I have to work harder :)