A talk by a friend

During the Education and Further Studies Fair 2010 at Mid Valley the other day, I had the pleasure of attending a talk by my friend Ramesh. He is a full time web designer among other things, and I first met him during the KLickr - the KL Flickr group outing. I have only been keeping up with him through his blog and it has been a while since I seen him in the flesh.

As part of career education, Ramesh had an hour to convince the audience that there is fulfilling career to be had in the field of web design and it should not be looked at as a fall-back option if other more glamorous options were closed - Medicine for instance!

The talk started at a slow pace but soon picked up traction with audience trickling in with time. The first parts were the formalities of what should be considered for a place for training, what the training entails and what are the options on offer upon completion of training. Then came the fun part - what the job he was doing now entails. He showcased his previous projects and the inside stories of his dealing with clients. The bit about what the employers expect was very good. Some gem there.

What was refreshing was the fact he admitted that he is still trying to learn while continuing to have fun. There are a lot of people out there who felt that education stops with graduation of their first degree. Education is a life-long process. If only some of the doctors realise that, than my job at training them would be that much easier …..

All in all, well done Ramesh. His entry on the event can be found here.

Education and Further Studies Fair

The above fair was held over the weekend at the Mid Valley Exhibition Center and I had the pleasure of attending it. It was certainly an eye opening affair and just confirmed the nation obsession of their children graduating with a Medical Degree. The reason I attended it was because my friend Ramesh was invited to be a guest speaker for the segment on career in digital media. The exhibition occupied a couple of halls at the huge venue and I must say 70% of the exhibit were all things healthcare - both Medical and Nursing, with a smaller segment on hospitality and engineering courses. I remember attending a similar fair around 20 years back, and 70% of the exhibit was on computer courses. Things had certainly came full circle.

I was in T-shirts and unshaven, and a few of the exhibitors asked me if I was interested in signing up for courses as they were doing “discounts” for those attending the fair.

Let me start with the obvious one. It was a private exhibition, and the booths were mainly by private colleges and universities. Some actually offer their own degree while others via a twinning initiatives. Certainly, the machinery was on hyperdrive in justifying the cost of doing the degree locally rather than going abroad. None of the public colleges were featured. All together, there were at least 50 participants. The usual suspects were there - IMU, Monash, Masterskills, Segi and Mahsa. I knew these centers, so I did not spend much time there. Instead, I spent a good hour chatting around with the ‘agencies’. These are local company, specialising in facilitating students finding places at Medical School abroad, mainly in the cheap. Cheap as in, in Indonesia, Russia and Ukraine. There were a few in India as well, but according to them, the Indian colleges have prefer to send their own representatives to Malaysia, and handle the enrollment and acceptance process in house. The pricing were certainly an eye opener. The Royal Perak College of Medicine (under Universiti Kuala Lumpur, which was in turn under MARA), offer the full Medical Degree - previously as MBBS(Mal) for over RM200K. These colleges in Russia would only set you back RM150K.

Check out the prices on offerThis certainly created a lot of excitement, not to mention the looser admission criteria. During my conversation with one of the agent, I spent 60% of the conversation about justifying that the degree will be ‘legal’. I was more interested in the admission criteria, ratio of staff to students, the medium - not all of these were in English, whether the clinical years include interaction with human beings.He then got suspicious and I had to come clean that I was an academician. He then asked for a more senior agent to deal with me. Off the record, the textbook will be in Russian, so you can guess what the medium will be in. The students will be required to do a ‘foundation’ year - in Russia, in order to familiarise themselves with the language. As far as the agent can tell, a credit in the Science subjects at SPM was enough for consideration! I think I shall keep the rest of the conversation off the record as clearly the agent was not comfortable discussing these matters with me.

An example of such 'agency'. This was not the one I talked to.On the subject of what will happen once they graduate, he was a bit more certain. He claimed that currently the degrees were accepted locally by the Malaysian Medical Council. He however conceded that the Ministry has the habit of moving the goalposts, and there will always be a small possibility that the students upon return might need further scrutiny. At the moment, these student were required to sit for the final year exams at a local university - we had a group of about 30 who took the final year exams with us on the last seating at UM. Of these, there were a few very good students, while some, especially from China was not as good. They were allowed to spend a six months period at the university for clinical attachment - at a cost. Some of the student were these degrees were exempted - we have currently a few of these at UMMC.

My advice to those interested in considering these colleges, please check the credentials with the MMC. I tried looking up at their website but I could not find such list. Maybe a quick phone call should do the trick. There were a few good Medical Schools in Russia, but I prefer not to mention them for fear of endorsement. The clue would be in the admission requirements. The easier it was to get in, the more suspect you should be. Good Luck! 

The Dodgy DVDs

I tweeted this afternoon that I was heading to Sungai Wang to get some ‘dodgy’ DVDs. The impression that I created to everybody was I was looking for porn! Far from it, especially there were torrents for those. I was looking for movies and TV series actually. Which bring me to the reason why I did that.

I wish that I was able to download these series legally in Malaysia. Unfortunately, there are a couple of snags to that, and I do not mean the problem with censorship. Yorais have to earn his living for that obviously, so I will just let him worry about that. The couples of problem I meant was the fact that legal outlets such as iTunes, Netflix and Hulu will never see the light of day in Malaysia. If you were resourceful, and many of us in Malaysia were, we can use a US credit card and have an IP proxy, and iTunes will be in your lap. Unfortunately, the second issue was more complicated. We have yet to have extensive really high quality fast broadband available. Without such service, these streaming and downloading services would be meaningless. Time Broadband sounded promising with the fibreoptics connections it offer - purported to carry data at up to 50 Mb/s. YES 4G was still not extensive, and once it has reached a bigger coverage area, the speed might start to suffer as well. Unifi seemed promising, but judging fromTM’s past performance with Streamyx, I would want to watch the space first before believing it to be the best thing since sliced bread as the service claimed to be.

Heavy traffic leading to Sungai Wang todayTreat for the boysIn the meantime, I could still download and stream some torrents down on my 1 Mb/s P1 Wimax connection. It had its moment, but lately, with the increased coverage in Lembah Kelang, the speed suffered as well. Alternatively, would be a quick trip to Sungai Wang to visit my friendly pirated DVD vendor to get my fix. Don’t get me wrong, the operating system and softwares in my computer were all original, even the games. Why did I buy them at such price? Because they were available to be bought. The vendor was kind today, and I managed to get hold of the latest seasons of Madmen, Entourage and Fringe! Puan Anita got her wish as well - Glee and Tru Blood.

Thank you and see you next week

As I mentioned earlier, next week will be exam week in Kelang and with the Xmas break coming up, it was understandable that once the exam was done, everybody would start to shut down. Some have even made plans to return to Mum and Dad - the one from Cameron Highlands, you know who you are! Since I will not be taking any formal classes next week, the students asked me to join them for some afternoon tea. We did so at the nearby Pizza Hut - apparently at the only shopping mall in Kelang as they admitted so grudgingly.

I left my wallet at home, so I was not able to fork out any park of the bill. I did offer to clean the plates and mop the floor however. It was nice to chat with them in matters outside medicine for a change. They tried hard however to pry out any clues from next week exam, but I managed to resist it. So, to all of you, good luck and please calm down and not get too excited during the clinical short case. If you just follow the steps, all of you will be fine. I shall see you next week!

It was raining outside

It looked like it would be raining outside. I just had lunch and was about to leave for Friday Prayers. But with the rain, I may have to give it a rest.

Today would mark the third week that I would be in Kelang teaching my Medical Students. I have another week to go, but it would be the exam week then. So, the students were understandably anxious - Malaysian education system is exam-driven, right from kindergarten to Medical School. We finished our clinical session just now and after another tutorial this afternoon, that would be it for the week. They had another pair of lecturers before me for four weeks, so all together they would have a total 7 weeks of teaching. For the exam next week, I prepared an essay question, as well as organising the clinical examination short cases for each one of them. All 44 of them.

When I first started coming to Kelang back in 2004, there were only 32 students in my class. All of them have graduated, and some of them still kept in touch. It was easy as I enjoy teaching, but 44 students to one lecturer was just way too much. There were too many compromises being made, and in the three weeks I had so far with them, I was sure not all of the students were happy. They had to understand however that I can;t please everyone, not it was my job to please them.

I kept on stressing to the department and the students that my role here in Kelang would be to facilitate teaching. Facilitating does not mean spoon-feeding them with information. As Medicine was such a wide and varied subject, I was not capable, or should be expected to be able to know everything. The pace of the development in Medicine was also very rapid. I read journals just to keep up and it was not easy to stay at the cutting edge of things. But at least the UM Medical Students should be grateful. They have dedicated lecturers who came and taught, them, not only from my department, but from Surgical, Gynaecology and Paediatrics as well. I can name a few other medical schools who struggle to keep up. They may have far too many medical students to cope with and were not able to supervise all of them. Here, at UM, even though we had to struggle at times, we tried our best to keep up and were successful most of the time. But I was not sure how long we can keep up with the 44 to 1 ratio. It was starting to break my back ….. I was worried that we give too much emphasis on quantity rather than quality.

The students complained that they did not have enough teaching. The lecturers complained that it was too much work to do going about teaching these large group. The Management were under pressure to produce more doctors by the powers that be. And I understood that Malaysia needed more doctors in general. The solution here may be very obvious. We need more lecturers. We need more people on the ground. We need to recruit more people. We need to bring the 44:1 ratio down. But there were not too many people to take up the task of being medical lecturers as it took time and commitment to do it well. There were many more easier path to take on to progress in medical career compared to being a lecturer. It was a vicious cycle. But we have to start somewhere and we have to make the job of being a lecturer more attractive.We have to start paying the medical lecturers better salary. Certainly there were move in that direction, but would be enough to make the carrer choice more attractive would it be able to make the career choice more attractive , than say, a chronic MO in Kementerian Kesihatan. I bet some of them were paid more than me doing half the amount of work.

It was raining heavily outside. It looked like that I will be missing my Friday prayers.