I'm in shock!!!

Gosh am I in shock! Today I was scheduled to have driving lesson at 2... When I called my instructor at 11, he told me that another student had caused an accident... so no lesson! Ok, that's not where the shock came from.... But the cause of the shock was the reason i was calling him. I wanted to skip the lesson so that I could visit a uni roadshow which happened to be in Miri today.

I heard that this university college called UCSI, which is in KL, had a medicine course... so i thought I'd hazard an application along with the likes of IMU. I wasn't expecting much, just wanted to hear what they had to say and what was this new institution like. So off I went, to Imperial Hotel (for those who know Miri, Imperial Suites, until my dad's big boss took it over along with the mall) at 2. I brought along my certificates and IC and stuff.

So when I got there, no one really paid attention to me for a while. So I sat down and SMS-ed for a while. Then one of the education agents/reps came up and ask me what course i was interested in. Obviously I said medicine. So they told me, you can immediately fill up the application form and once you've paid the registration fee, you can be interviewed immediately. I was like, HUH?!? I was in T-shirt and jeans... no way suitable attire for an interview for Medicine.

She passed me an application form and I sat down at a table to fill it up... soon there were 3 guys at the table too. I knew one was a rep but didn't recognise the other two. They talked about golf, of all things. So I finished filling in the particulars and when I looked up, the rep guy immediately held out his hand for the form and the other two, who happened to be on either side of that guy, immediately started scrutinising my form and certificates. I got quite freaked out. And at that point I hadn't even worked out what I discovered 1 hour later...

So I went in for the general campus talk and sat through a biotech and food science talk after it. Then a guy beckoned me to exit the function room, which I did, upon which he told me, you can have the interview now. At first I thought he was going to interview me, but he just led me to one of the small meeting rooms and told me to wait.

In a minute, a guy walked in, who, horror of horrors was one of the two golf-discussing guys a the table earlier. Worse still, this man had been sitting next to me earlier and I hadn't really paid attention to him. All I knew was that his spoken English was excellent and I recall that I thought he was Chinese. At that point I suddenly recalled something which had been uttered by the guy who took my form. He had said that the dean of the medical school was here (in chinese, btw). So in my blurness, i had taken the words "here" to mean on the premises rather than next to me. So you can imagine my shock... which evolved into "Oh great. I ignored this guy earlier."

So we talked, one-on-one. I have gone through only 2 serious interviews before this... namely JPA and Nottingham. This one was different from both. It was really quite an open discussion. First up was a strange question. "You look like a serious person. Are you?" My first reaction was, "I think I am." Stupid answer... but I had not yet recovered from the shock. He continued from there. " You think? Or you are?" I was knocked back to reality, and admitted, "I am."Only then did he take a seat.

Next came a ritual question, after the preliminaries of "This is just a discussion..." and "Relax, it's not an exam." The question was "What do you think is the job of a doctor?" (all conversation not verbatim) I answered this in two parts. First i touched on the basic medical care and support... and he said I'd only got 30% and let me continue. Next I touched on public health and research. He upgraded me to 60%. Then I thought for a while, and honestly answered him that it was all that crossed my mind at the moment. He accepted that, and proceeded to talk. From what he said, I inferred that what my answer lacked was that a doctor was part of a team. At this point, I was scolding myself inwardly, because this was similar to what I had been through in the Nottingham interview.

He then proceeded to some brief details on CCAs. I briefly outlined my few menial posts in SPM days as well as JC. Then I proceeded to tell him that I played some badminton recreationally. For some reason, I mentioned that this was "not documented". My interviewer then picked up on this comment. He stated that he too was not interested in CCA-related certificates when he interviewed and asked me to guess why. As if to further prove that I was not mentally stable at the time, I made a poor attempt at humour, suggesting that it must be tiring to see similar certificates over and over again. He smiled, said no and asked me to try again. This time I was serious, and I talked about how some people would have motives for joining activities, namely for the "nama" i.e. the certificate. He seemed satisfied with my answer.

We also talked about the realities of a career in medicine... the long hours, the need to be widely read, to understand human behaviour etc. He even pointedly told me that my seriousness, mentioned earlier on, had to change. I nodded, albeit a little regretfully. Then we touched on how doctors went into private practice just for money... or in other words, the easy way to an easy life... less night calls and shifts and the like. To this, I commented that the hectic schedule which was normally despised did enable doctors to gain exposure to various patients and cases, and so it was not a loss. The interviewer suddenly seemed extremely pleased with this statement and for the first time, I thought I did something right.

The man also asked where else I was applying to, so I stated in order: Nottingham, NUS, IMU and UCSI... which were indeed my most serious applications to date, except for UCSI which, I admitted to him, I had only very recently found out about. Then he asked me what would influence my choice if all were to make me offers. So I talked about the repute of the institutions as well as the issue of finance. He continued by asking if finances were not a problem and IMU as well as UCSI both made me offers, which would I accept? I stopped to think a moment, trying to fathom what this was trying to get at, before answering frankly that my priority would be given to IMU. Upon being asked to explain, I mentioned that IMU had a longer history than UCSI, which, as I told him, I took into account in my consideration. He considered this answer before asking me if I had caught a report of what a minister had implied regarding 2 private medical colleges 2 months ago. Since I now subsist on Chinese newspapers, which i dislike, I told him no. He proceeded to tell me about how these two colleges had been snubbed by a minister/govt official for not meeting quality standards.

I cannot remember how we got to the topic of who he was... But i remember that he asked me, "Do you know what I was before this?" I apologised and said no. Then came the really shaking revelation, He was Professor Dato' Dr. Mohd. Roslani bin Abdul Majid, founding dean of the medical school in Universiti Sains Malaysia, ex-advisor of IMU, ex-UKM faculty member and a pioneer of Problem-Based Learning for medicine in Malaysia. I was so utterly shocked that I lost most of my nerve. Thankfully the interview was nearing its end.

Dato' Dr. Roslani then asked me, " Would you like to know whether you got the place?" And as I thought that they followed the standard procedure of considering other applicants first before sending out a mass of offers, I answered with a question as to whether it would be fair to the other applicants. He then explained that they were a private institution and that he did not issue offers that way. Then he told me point-blank, "I'm going to say yes to your application." And because earlier when I said that I did not know who he was, he had commented jokingly that I was going to fail the interview, I had not known what to think. So when he told me that I had got it, I honestly and gratefully thanked him. To me, having been able to make an impression on him was already an achievement and a great learning experience. I then shook his hand and left, still in a slight daze, after a few words with one of the education reps regarding arrrangements for the offer.