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📖 About

Who Am I

Hi there 👋🏼 I’m Aqeel, a 2nd year medical student currently studying at the University of Birmingham. This site is just for me to show anything I find that helps me in my life, whether that be studying, resources or anything else.

As for this page specifically, it will pretty much just be about who I am and a bit about my story of how I am where I am 🙃.

Quick Facts About Me

  1. 🏡 I am currently 19 years old and was born on the 16th of October 2003.
  2. 🥊 Some of my hobbies are boxing, drawing and my favourite of all – graphic design.
  3. 🎥 My first videos that I used to post on my YouTube channel were gaming videos ranging from Call of Duty, Overwatch and Rainbow Six Siege.
  4. 🏋🏽 I’ve been saying I’m going to go to the gym consistently and get in shape since i was 13… 7 years later and I’m still sating the same thing 🙁
  5.  I’ve been doing graphic design since I was about 5yrs old on photoshop back in its earlier days.

My Story

In secondary school i wasn’t ever the type to do the best on a test in the class, but i’d always do good enough to stay in the top sets. And this is ironically because unlike now, i never used to study at all apart from maybe one time (all i did was read a few pages from a textbook lol). But luckily enough I still got decent enough GCSEs in 2020 – four 8s, four 7s and three 6s.

During the year 2020 I had a lot of time for self reflection due to the lockdowns. During this time I realised I was too distracted with temporary things like dressing ‘cool’, social media etc.I decided I need to actually at least think about what I want to do in my future and how to get there. It was around this time that my friend was talking about how much he wants to go into medicine, and coincidentally I also came across Ali Abdaal’s YouTube channel where he would talk about med school and how to get in – I haven’t looked back since🤣.

Now that I knew what I wanted to do, it was now about action, so I now looked at how to study and get good grades in A-levels as they are generally much harder than GCSEs (especially chem, bio and maths which is what i picked🥲.

During my search for how to get good grades I came across active recall and spaced repetition which are principles that I still use now as they are top tier. I struggled applying these principles at the start of year 12 so I got terrible grades for the first half of that year😬. But when i found out about Anki and started using that it was a game-changer as I got my first ever A when i started to use it!

I ended year 12 in July 2021 feeling positive about moving into year 13 and applying for medicine. It was now time for me to tackle the UCAT🤯. I used Medify like most people to study for the UCAT, and i was getting decent scores for the most part, but in August my whole family started getting Covid-19.

I had to pretty much stay in one room away from my family for a few weeks because they knew I had an exam coming up so I pretty much was isolated from them for a good while. This all of course made me pretty unable to focus on studying for the UCAT because I was worried about my family. Unfortunately my worrying was warranted as on the date 27/08/2021 my mother passed away.

This was a really tough period for me because even with this life changing time occurring in my life I knew that the world wouldn’t stop for me, so all I could do was push on and do what I needed to do. So I did just that, I got 2500 & band 2 on my UCAT in early September and also passed my driving test🚗 the following week after my UCAT. Then by October 15th I had sent off my UCAS application and so now i could breathe for a minute as that bulk of stress was over with.

Getting through the rest of year 13 was still really tough, but by one way or another I got into the University of Birmingham Medical School with the grades ABB🎉!

Now being in med school it is my aim to post and share anything that helps me such as ways to study, any resources and by posting videos on YouTube so people can also learn anything new that way!