Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Internships: the overseas student's perspective

Which brings us to the overseas students, poor souls who subsidise the locals. NB, I am not an overseas student.

A straw poll of the overseas students on my course found the following:

  1. Yes, they would like to finish their intern training here, please.
  2. Indeed, to practice in Australia was one of the reasons I am spending ~A$45k pa on tuition.
  3. No, I didn't know that there will be a shortage of training places.
  4. What's all this about Groups A, B and C.
  5. That hardly seems fair.
This is a position that seems wholly reasonable. There is a degree of caveat emptor, but I would be interested to see how overseas applicants' expectations are currently being managed.

From what I can see, the representatives of the student body are doing nothing to help overseas students.

In my opinion, this is not fair.

1 comment:

  1. I cannot believe it, just when I thought I can finally settle down on my future and be ready to work hard for it....

    I would be an international med student in UWS in 2010, and hearing this news is just ...

    I am really upset right now, do u think the situation will improve by 2014 or 2015 or 2016?

    I think the most realistic solution here is to limit the intake of medical students, why is there such a surge in med student intake? This is certainly not the way to helping with solving the "shortage of doctors", in fact, without enough internship places, increasing the intake of med students are just increasing unnecessary casualties!!!
    Medicine course itself requires a HEAP LOT of work already, why do we medical students still need to add another burden created by other parties onto our shoulders? This is not fair at all!!!
    Besides, from your other post, they could just discard the weak. If that happens to me, I wouldnt mind being discarded if I found out that I am not qualified of being a doctor, at least I know other patients are in more capable and safer hands.
    I understand that local students should be prioritised, but emphasis should be placed on international students as well. We are paying heaps of money not only into medicine course, but also the economy because of the standards of living here. both of which totals to 70 k per year.
    This is just not fair. After all, we just wanna be doctors, good doctors, and it is difficult enough already without having to worry about the shortage of internship places.

    Anyway, srry for rambling, just thought you might wanna hear from a prospective international student about this.

    ReplyDelete