Well,
hello there. My name is Sidi Muhammad Yusoff from the Batch 30, and today I’m
gonna talk to you regarding my current years doing Medicine in the Royal
College of Surgeons of Ireland, Ireland. If you are aspiring to be a medical student, read on!
First
of all, here’s a big, fat disclaimer. This post would be focused on the
twinning program, not the full 5-years program in Ireland. Some people might be
put off by the word twinning, so I would like to tell you about that right off
the bat. Secondly, this is not a post intending to compare the pros and cons
between the full and the twinning program. I could give you hundreds of reason
(just a hyperbole, haha) why I think the program could at least yield
advantages at par with the full-course, but, hey, you could always retort with
“Yes, yes, I hear you…but it’s only 2 years and a half!” So, considering the
unbreakable impasse, we would focus on this program itself, objectively.
Anyhow,
the way the post would be expanded is as follows; it will consists of three
major parts 1) Academics, where I get to told you horror stories and 2) Life,
which considering myself as a shut-in, would not be too long but I think
sufficient enough to give you readers a cursory viewpoint of the life in
Dublin. Last but not least, I would try my best to explain regarding how the
twinning program works.
So,
let us proceed to the gist of the post, by throwing to you people random facts.
Just like our everyday lectures. Lovely, isn’t it?
PART
I: ACADEMICS
Firstly,
a little history of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI). To
summarize it in one apt sentence, our Professor of Anatomy, Clive Lee said,
“…we [RCSI] established our School of Medicine earlier than our neighbor next
door [Trinity College]…” *triggered**read in annoying voice* But Sidi! Date of establishment doesn’t matter!
Tut tut tut…I know that, alrite. What I’m trying to say, jokes aside, is the
College was established in the 1789, and thus it has quite a long history. The
College was established by a royal mandate of the British Crown and has sisters
(not quite sure the right term for it) Colleges established aside from Ireland,
such as in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Now,
here’s another trivia about the name of the college. In the Middle Age,
proto-surgeons existed in the profession of barbers. Yes, barbers. The barbers
back then were skilled in minor operations such as bloodletting and well,
amputations. And the rest is history. You can see the remnants of the
barber-surgeon relationship via the red and white barber pole, or the fact that
surgeons here, at least in the British Isle, are addressed as “Mr.” instead of
“Dr.” This traces back to the yonder days where the barber-surgeons aren’t
required to complete a medical doctorate (they inherit their skills by
apprenticeship) to practice. Yep, true story.
Now,
having dispensed with the background of the College, I would like to continue
on the syllabus. One of the uniqueness of the College is that we learn through
the system-based method instead of individual subjects. What it means is,
instead of learning Physiology, Pharmacology or Anatomy, we have modules named
Cardiovascular and Respiratory (CVR), or Renal, Endocrine, Gastrointestinal,
Urinary and Breast (REGUB) where basically everything in the individual
subjects are merged into this one specific module. So, it really puts theory
and application in one breath and makes it more systematic and contextual.
Another
uniqueness about the syllabus is the Anatomy. Again, there’s no standalone
Anatomy subject, but the way we learn the subject is quite peculiar. What we
learn is a reoriented Clinical Anatomy, which according to its founder, Abraham
Colles (who named the Colles’ fracture), emphasized on the importance of
learning the functional bits of the human anatomy instead of including also the
peculiar and bizarre. While this really save our skin and memory space, this
also means that the way the subject is structured is a bit of foreshadowing on
how the clinical years are conducted. So, it really eases the leap from the
pre- to the clinical years. To put it in an example, there would not be much of
that deadly leap between lower form Mathematics and Additional Mathematics. I,
for one, almost die from that leap.
And
so, as all of you guys know already, the total course-year for Medicine is
about 5 years, where the pre- and clinical years are divided roughly equal to
each other. In RCSI, the two phases are further divided into three stages or
Cycles, the Junior, Intermediate and Senior cycles.
Probably
a few speakers coming to the school saying that in Medicine, all that matters
is whether you pass or fail. But, to my very surprise, it is not the case in
RCSI. Since our first semester finals, the marks are in bands and categories.
You have the First Class Honors (70-100), and the preceding Seconds Class Upper
and Lower. You can imagine the pressure of not only just seeing whether you
pass the cutting point or not, you can also have the pleasure of seeing the
labels of your marks. Lovely, isn’t it? Not that it matters, as the Honors for
the degree was assessed solely form the Senior Cycles, but still…I guess it
might helped with your morale if you get good marks, or continuing to spark
that fire to improve. It works both ways.
I
would also like to mention that RCSI is all about research. We have so many
programs focusing on researches, such as the Research Summer School (where you
are granted a chance to participate in an active and ongoing medical
researches), International Conference for Healthcare and Medical Students
(where you can pursue your own research) and many student exchanges research
programs in Canada, the States, China, Japan and the Indochina. You can
participate in these programs and had the honor to have your name included in
the journal and the chance to further furnish your CV. So, it’s a golden
opportunity not to be missed.
The
last thing that I would like to share is quite the sensitive subject. Before
even I considered whether to choose either the RCSI or University College
Dublin (UCD), we received a WhatsApp message comparing the pros and cons of
those two. You can see that the pros of RCSI is that all that will be assessed
in the finals are in the slides, so you don’t need to be forsaken with vague
syllabus outline. The cons are, the exams are tough. From the perspective of a
mere second-year student, yes the finals are very tough and there’s a lot to
chew on but let me reminisce an anecdote. I recalled it was an evening class
(Yes, most of our class is from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.), and everyone’s brain cells
were melting from excess information from this one lecture. Then the lecturer,
sensing the anxiety among the audiences, coolly said, “...I know it’s hard, but
this is what you enrolled into, right?” Perhaps a little harsh, but that’s the
truth. You gotta find your tempo and adapt.
PART
II: THE LIFE
RCSI
was located on the southern part of Dublin (Dublin was divided into the
southern and northern part; being divided by the river Liffey). Before I
proceed with the day-to-day elaboration, I would like to elaborate on the
student body of the College.
Perhaps
Medicine schools are associated with competitive atmosphere, like one you would
see, for an instance, in the series House
or Suits in the law schools. I came
here expecting for the survival of the fittest or the law of the jungle kind of
life. And I was lowkey expecting that the admin were as cruel as the
Engineering School in the movie Three
Idiots. But, thank God, they are far from being that.
Here’s
one quote for you to describe the student body of RCSI. One of my housemates
were now in his clinical years, and despite being a student from another
medical school, he said that RCSI trainees or interns are very much known by
their friendliness and willingness to hold tutorials and stuff to help the
medical students. And, here in the pre-clinical years, the atmosphere is just
about the same. Yes, you have your occasional know-all in the lecture hall
chiming every answer to every question asked by the lecturer. But, everybody
here is more willing than ever to give you a hand. There are study groups or
people distributing notes and references, basically everybody are trying to
help everybody with anything they can help. I’m really being quite useless here
trying to depict the synergistic culture here in RCSI, but you get the point.
The
admins, also, participate actively in students’ development and health. There
are workshops, tutorials designed to complement the lecture in the best way
they can. And, you don’t have that condemning tone found in the Three Idiots here by the admin. They
constantly revise the content and orientation of the syllabi, and even held a
workshop to expose the students on how they design the MCQ’s.
The
composition of the student body is way out of one’s expectation. The lecture
hall was basically a melting pot of different tongues and cultures; one could
describe the student body as a Babel of different nationalities and cultures,
in a positive way, of course.
Now
for the day-to-day life.
If I
would like to describe Dublin in terms of its size and activity, I would say it
a bit similar to any of our midsized towns in Malaysia. Minus the bus and the
new tram services, Dublin still retains a particular rustic air. Of course, we
have parts of the city so lively with activity and crowd, like the Grafton and
St. James Street (for shopping) and the Temple Bar (well, Irish indeed have a
keen liking towards bars), but as you travel away from the pulsing city center,
expect a calm and silent ambient.
It
is really easy to find halal shops or food here. Some of the restaurants are
conscious on our status as Muslim, so they’ll meet you and explain their
ingredients and stuffs. I would say, there’s no problem whatsoever in finding
dine here. We even have halal Subway at selected joints. I don’t think I’ll
prolong this readily long post with more trivia on the life here, so if you
have further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
PART
III: THE PROGRAMME
Alright,
to the main point. How can you enroll into this program? For myself, I took a
2-year International Baccalaureate in Kolej MARA Banting, fortunately made it
to score beyond the cutoff point and was enrolled into this twinning program.
At
first, all of us are bound for Ireland for the full course. But, things
happened and it is not my place to explain about it and so our 100+ people in
our batch are split into the full-course program in Ireland or United Kingdom,
twinning program in RCSI or University College of Dublin (UCD), students in
India either in the Belgaum program or the Manipal program, and some of us in
the Malaysian universities.
Two
Irish universities wholly own the twinning program, the Royal College of
Surgeons in Ireland and University College Dublin. So, in case you are
wondering, yes, our medical degrees are from Ireland. The Irish Medical Council
(IMC), Malaysian Medical Council (MMC) and other regulatory bodies throughout
the world recognize the degrees, so no worries. It is about 2 years and a half
in Ireland first for pre-clinical and we will continue our clinical years in
Penang Medical College. Can we apply for posting in Ireland after graduating?
Yes, our graduation is at the same period with the Dublin campus, so we are
free to apply for posting in Ireland.
What
is our status compared to the full-courser in RCSI? Basically it is the same,
with no difference whatsoever. The syllabi are similar, the level of training
is similar, we even had our exams at the same time with the Dublin campus and
the similarities just go on. Think of the Penang Medical College as just
another campus of RCSI and the UCD, like the USM in Malaysia has several
campuses in several states. Are there any differences between the campuses?
None whatsoever.
I
think I have covered most of my objectives in this post. The post is not meant
to be exhaustive nor persuading you saying that this program is better than
others. It is meant to give you, the readers a taste and a general view on
how’s life for a medicine student here, in the Royal College of Surgeons. Do
not hesitate to contact me for more information, I would always be glad to
help. For reasons I myself never sure why, I don’t have a Facebook account but
I have an Instagram account instead. So, just send me DM’s at @mamlukqayser if
you wanna ask anything (you are not obliged to follow me or anything, I rarely
post anything anyway).
So,
anywhere you are or whatever your path is, be strong and good luck!
Sidi
Muhammad Yusoff bin Azli Shah
Batch
30 SAMURA
Royal
College of Surgeons in Ireland.
EXTRA:
GALLERIA
My
camera’s not that great, so bear with me. I also kidnapped some of the images
from the Net, so here you go.
Caption: So here’s the anatomy room where you guys will be
exploring the subject of Anatomy on cadavers. You can see there’re boards with
people’s name on it. They were boards for prizewinners. There’s one for Dr.
Azizah nearby, but I don’t want to get my name affiliated with any political
movement, aite?
Caption: So here’s the newly renovated basement floor. You
can see they spent way much on the design et cetera. The canteen here is Halal
and you really get that hotel-ish vibe from it, so yeah interesting.
Caption: Can you see blood trickling from the wall? Just
kidding, here’s the Examination Hall where we had our exams (Yeah, I’m
Sherlock). On the walls were the pictures of past Presidents of the RCSI (I
think), while the boards on the front are the names for Honorary Fellows. You
can spot few names from Malaysia, and there’s Mahathir too in it, but as the
world are too sensitive right now, I’ll not show you his name. So that’s that.
Caption: Here’s the new building,
which is located literally across the Old Building. They are quite neat and
futuristic looking. It housed the Library too, which I think emulated Google
way way too much, in terms of its airy and open environment, where everyone can
see everyone.
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