OUR MEDICAL DREAMS
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
Out
of boredom and trying to engage myself in something positive as usual which I
have been doing lately, I went to one familiar spot to cool off, one amazing
thing about sitting at that spot is hearing what different say and accessing
them, anyway let’s not sound so serious, sitting at that spot too I get to see
a lot of girls, Yes I mean lots of them that I even lose count all the time, I
get to see girls of different shapes and sizes, but is that really the main thing,
well I really don’t know but I think it’s part of it, you know distracting the
mind for while feels like you forget all your worries momentarily.
One
of these days, I got to encounter a family, from their discussion I think they
were waiting one of their family members who was supposed to be defending her
M.Sc. After quite a brief observation I found out that the woman had a son and
a daughter, their Uncle or Whatever was babysitting them and they also had a
bigger Uncle who was also around. So while the kids were playing the Uncle
asked the boy do you this place the boy said yes, and the uncle was like you
will come here to study Medicine or Engineering. That didn’t strike me anyway till after one
day, it just struck my mind that the typical African parents programs the
thoughts of Law, Medicine or Engineering from the time we are very little most
times without giving a thought about what we may want. At times we the children
just delve into that without even knowing our abilities just in the bid of pleasing
our parents, come to think of it do we really have a choice. Cos the typical
African parent would rather not pay your fees that let you study that which is
not regarded as a “Professional” course.
Looking
back to my secondary school days at Federal Government College, Ikot Ekpene,
from the time we enter senior secondary we are segregated according to what
each of us wants to be in future after series of questions and forms we fill at
the Guidance Counsellors office, we are then segregated into the Arts, Pure
Sciences, Technical/Engineering and Commercial class. If there was an
opportunity to go round the 3 streams which are regarded as science classes 90%
if not all of us want to be medical doctors, funny 4 years has gone by now very
few of us were able to get into medical school, those of us who didn’t get into
medical school in Nigeria due to some certain reasons switched to related
courses like Microbiology, Biochemistry, Physiology, Anatomy, Biological
Sciences, some of us went to the physical sciences and engineering after having
lost hope of being doctors while most of us went to chase our dreams outside
the shores of our Nation Nigeria.
Fast
forward into the main university setting for those who chose alternate pathways
you find out that 90% of them want to be medical doctors, using Biochemistry
Class of 15 from my school if I got to interview all of them, you get to find
out that at one point in life it was medical school or nothing, maybe after
writing JAMB once or twice, most people up to four times and couldn’t get into
medical school chose the closest cousin which somehow looking at seems to be a
very distant cousin, cos I wonder why biochemists wouldn’t be awarded our own
medical degree, something instead of the conventional MBBS or MB BCh, we have
MB Bs. BCM cos our goddamn curriculum spans the medical school curriculum
except for the clinical aspect yet we are marginalized, a graduate of
biochemistry who wants to study medicine would undergo and 5years of training
learning all the shits I learnt as a biochemist again, we can’t even take a masters
degree in Chemical Pathology without a Postgraduate Diploma but someone who
took the same course in undergrad would comfortably be admitted for a higher
degree in biochemistry.
If
a survey was carried out on the students of higher institutions to know the
reason why fail, am quite sure the response “I don’t like what am studying
would rank highest” which leads to lack of interest on the part of the
students, cos the mindset of the student would let me just do this thing, if I
can maintain being and average student fine. But at the end of the day it takes
more than they realize to be an average student, then failure sets in, which
transcends to psychological wreck if not remedied cos most parents would start
making comments like “you can’t even do anything”, “you are good for nothing”
“look at you, you can’t even pass physics and you want to do electrical
electronics engineering or any bloody engineering course out there”, “you can’t
even pass biochemistry or microbiology but you want to do medicine’ but they
fail to realize when they sub-consciously programmed all them Engineering and
Medicine in our heads which even makes us shittier cos once you feel and accept
the fact that you are worthless and can’t even excel in those areas, but most
times those things are not even our dreams, some of us wants to be zebras,
birds carefree not worrying about anything.
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1 comments
Oya fashion professor
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