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A Productive Day in the Life vlog

2020-01-21 · Vlog or day in the life · Ali · recording, 6:21 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Relationships and personal life (also: Learning and studying, Business and entrepreneurship, Medicine and his doctor years) · mode: Demonstration and walkthrough · tags: His medical past, Aimed at students, Sponsor segment present

Ali vlogs a day off in Cambridge: marking physiology essays in cafés, a long talk with a business coach, a new bike, a physiology supervision at Girton College and the Addenbrooke's pantomime, which he calls the most rewarding thing he has done apart from his channel.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — A day off: a late start and a drive into Cambridge

  • ★ On a day off Ali sets his alarm for 7:30am instead of his usual 6:30, snoozes it until 8:30 and lies in bed doing nothing until 9. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Ali starts marking physiology essays at Jamaica Blue, his favourite coffee shop in Cambridge, getting through five of the ten he has to mark in about an hour and a half. — 00:00:29 · Cambridge

00:00:58 — Marking physiology essays at Jamaica Blue: why the introduction matters and the halo effect

  • ★★ Marking physiology essays, Ali finds it hard as an examiner to keep concentrating and read every word, especially with poor handwriting, and says the quality of an essay's introduction usually tracks that of the whole essay. — 00:00:58
  • ★★★ Pointing to the halo effect, Ali advises students to make an essay's introduction and its presentation (handwriting, diagrams) top-notch, so that a lazy examiner who sees at a glance that it looks the part is tempted to give a high mark. — 00:01:27

00:01:40 — Lunch with Liam, a business coach, on life and business strategy

  • ★★ Over lunch at Bill's, Ali spends an hour and a half talking about life and business strategy with Liam, an ex-professional footballer turned business coach who helps grow and scale businesses and who recognised Ali from his videos; Ali says growing and scaling a business is exactly what he is trying to do at the moment. — 00:01:56

00:02:15 — Sponsor read for Brilliant

  • ★★ Finishing his physiology essay marking at the Waterstones bookshop café, Ali finds marking quite fun in a nice place with a good atmosphere, and it refreshes his knowledge of nerve, muscle and cardiac physiology. — 00:02:55

00:03:05 — Marking at Waterstones, a new bike and a physiology supervision at Girton College

  • ★ Ali picks up a new bike at the Grand Arcade, where the bike shop worker, who has his own YouTube channel, recognises him from YouTube. — 00:03:24
  • ★★ Ali brings doughnuts as a New Year treat to his physiology supervision at Girton College, where for about an hour he goes through the mock multiple-choice paper his students sat under timed conditions the day before and gives general advice on what makes a good essay. — 00:03:53 · Girton College
  • ★★ Ali goes to the Mumford Theatre at Anglia Ruskin University for this year's (2020) Addenbrooke's pantomime, put on by Cambridge medical students: The Little Mermaid, about Ariel, a natural sciences student desperate to become a medical student, and Ursula, an evil octopus trying to take over the world. — 00:03:53 · Addenbrooke's Hospital Pantomime, University of Cambridge, Cambridge

00:04:10 — The Addenbrooke's pantomime, The Little Mermaid

  • ★★★ Ali took part in the Addenbrooke's pantomime in all three of his clinical years, first in the singing troupe, then as a director, then in the cast, and says that apart from his YouTube channel it is the most rewarding thing he has ever done. — 00:04:22 · Addenbrooke's Hospital Pantomime
  • ★ Ali's favourite numbers in this year's (2020) Addenbrooke's pantomime are a parody of Shawn Mendes' "Treat You Better" about the NHS and private healthcare, and "You've Got a Friend in Me" rewritten as "You've Got an STD". — 00:04:22 · Addenbrooke's Hospital Pantomime, NHS

00:05:15 — Writing the script at night, the drive home to St Albans, sign-off

  • ★★ At around 1:30am Ali leaves to drive home to St Albans, where his family lives, picking up a friend who is staying over. — 00:05:21 · St Albans

Humor (significant)

  • Ali opens by answering a question about his days off that he admits nobody asks. — 00:00:00

    “a question that no one ever asks me”

  • A bowel movement delays his departure by twenty minutes, so he uses it to write the vlog's script. — 00:00:29

    “Not to have my productivity thwarted by mere biology, I bust out my phone and start writing the voiceover script for this very video.”

  • Another bathroom trip after lunch, so he does a puzzle on his phone in there. — 00:01:56

    “Again, I never let mere physiology get in the way of my productivity”

  • After describing the pantomime's "You've Got an STD" parody, he explains the acronym for younger viewers. — 00:04:52

    “For the under 14s amongst us, STD stands for sexually transmitted disease. Sorry YouTube, please don't demonetize this video.”

  • At night he writes the script of the video he is filming. — 00:05:21

    “Hashtag meta.”

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Addenbrooke's Hospital Pantomime · halo effect

Also: People: Shawn Mendes

Organizations: Anglia Ruskin University · Girton College · NHS · University of Cambridge · Waterstones

Places: Bill's · Cambridge · Grand Arcade · Jamaica Blue · Mumford Theatre · St Albans

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