YACMA CSE Office Hours

YACMA holds an annual Communication Skills Workshop for our second-year students – this is normally an in-person event where they can practice history-taking skills with volunteers from the years above and get feedback. Unfortunately, we entered another COVID-19 lockdown in August this year just around the time where we usually hold our Communication Skills Workshop. There was little we could do but we still wanted to provide educational and helpful content to our second years – thus after some creative brainstorming we decided to go ahead with a ‘CSE Office Hours’. This was an online session where second-year students could drop by and ask any questions they had, get some one-on-one practice, or just talk about the year in general. Before this event, we also decided to provide second-year students with a ‘CSE Cheat Sheet’ which detailed the structure of history taking and provided them some general tips. We held this online on the 2 September 2020, two days prior to their in-person CSE assessment. The evening started off with a brief presentation going through the structure of history taking – from the presenting complaint, covering SOCRATES, and so forth. We then proceeded to one-on-one practice sessions with allocated volunteers. We are very grateful for the volunteers who came and helped on the night. The event was a casual session and we were glad we were able to help even just a few students and hoped that this experience was beneficial for them. Hopefully we will continue to run this event in-person in future years.