1. Academic qualification

If you are a 3.8-4 STPM student then by all means go ahead. If you are an average student (like me), don't even bother.

Let me give you some stats in IMU

Every year, fresh intakes of medicine students are around 300

At the end, only 50 or so students graduate


2. Motive

I wonder if you are really suited for doing medicine when you said you wanna take Radiology, a specialization that have little patient interaction

Don't need to lie, I have a friend doing medicine and his main objective for radio is the good pay and isolation

If you want job security, forget it, medical grads are saturated as fuck right now

Other than local unis, you still need to compete with private (IMU, MAHSA, UTAR, PERDANA and even some subpar university that I never heard before is offering medical degree nowadays) and foreign uni grads (Russia, India, Indonesia)

Even if you get your housemanship, its contract based, and after 2 years, they will evaluate whether to take you in as permanent staff or not, from what I heard, its difficult because turnover rates are low

Radiology is a specialization, you need to be selected to join a masters programme in local uni (private does not count). Again, you need to compete again for specialization.


3. Financial

I am not sure about UTAR, but a 5 years medicine course in IMU cost right now 500k myr.

Perdana is around half of it at 250k.

These are still extraorbitant amount.

If you are thinking of taking PTPTN, max I think was 60%, leading to around 150k loan, you still need to fork out around 100k for the fees

Now on the 150k loan

There is a 1% FLAT RATE per annum based on your original loan meaning that if you split over 15 years of payment, you need to fork out 22k of interest

And you need to repay close to 1000 per month for 15 years to clear your debt

For housemanship, you get paid around 4k, after paying your ptptn loan monthly you are left with 3k a month

Source : https://codeblue.galencentre.org/2019/12/27...-below-juniors/

3K A MONTH FOR ALL THAT SHIT YOU GO THROUGH

TOPKEK

Conclusion: Medicine is a shit degree, it WAS good years ago, same as pharmacy

Today era, if you want to earn money, computer science is the way to go

Fresh grad programmer = 7k basic pay

Disclaimer: I am not a medical grad, but these are what I observed and having doctors as friends. If actual doctors can correct me, I would be happy.

well you don't need a medical degree to be a researcher, any STEM fields will do

as on a researcher life, do u like to spend ungodly hours in the lab and write papers all the time? your work is fueled solely by your motivation and not renumeration.

for me, i am sick of lab work, however, i like the analysis part, therefore i choose to specialize more to computational biology, especially when in mco period, lab are closed, but i still can continue on my project because its all computational work

Doctors are always required, but gov would rather spend money elsewhere instead of healthcare. That’s why you always hear houseman overworked and underpaid.

Well you get what you paid for, personally I feel imu mbbs is top tier amongst private in Malaysia. Perdana well, there’s a reason it’s half priced compared to IMU

I can’t answer that directly because the pathway is different for everyone.

Because it’s not fixed, the best you can do is by making yourself as relevant as possible.

You can try with a postgrad in bioinformatics or related subfields

Skills, I would say coding is a must, and an ungodly amount of googling skills and logical thinking.

Job prospect depends on how you market yourself.

Yes. It is a ridiculous culture.

Not to mention the constant harassment by senior doctors because “suck it up we go through the same thing as you, so we get to do the same thing to you”

That’s why you hear so many young doctors suicide

MLT is the worst career choice ever

Even 10 years ago, turnover rate was so high in the bp lab I interned in

Pay after 10 years still remains the same - +- 1800 per MONTH for degree holder and even in COVID times, some fuckwit MLT company still DARE to put out job listing for 10 MYR / HOUR. 10 MYR/Hour to risk myself in covid infection? No thanks.

Heck you don't even need a degree to do MLT, a diploma would do

All I can say is, you are still young, still got time to explore what you wanted to do in future

Your career choice right now will change in the future

I went from wanting to do medicine to taking biomed then after grad change to wanting to do molecular biology (biotech) with my masters focusing on that, phd project a totally unrelated field from molecular biology and finally to my current career choice of doing data analytics post phd (still haven't grad yet).

It took me close to 10 years to decide on what I wanted to do, but I didn't regret any of my choice because it took me eventually to what I am satisfied of now.

10 years ago, you tell me to do computer science, I would answer the same as you did. Heck, I skipped all my bioinformatics lectures during my degree time, but now I am doing bioinformatics.