Duke-NUS - Admissions Blog

Tell us about your path to Duke-NUS. Before coming to Duke-NUS, I did my undergraduate studies in NUS and majored in Pharmacy. During my third year of studies, I did a 6-week hospital attachment and that experience shifted my sights to a possible medical career. After I graduated, I trained as a pre-registration pharmacist in National University Hospital (NUH) for 9 months and subsequently took some time off to develop my sporting interests before starting in Duke-NUS.

The most important question Why do you want to be a doctor? Think about that question really hard because it’s going to come up for the rest of your life. It’s going to be on your application essays to medical school, on your interviews, on your dinner table with your parents; it’s going to be a question that you’re asked for the rest of your life from the moment you decide to enter medical school or even do an undergraduate pre-medical degree, as I did. There is no one answer to this question and through the years, my answer changed drastically. I knew from the age of seven that I wanted to be a doctor and most of my life has been shaped by that decision. But it wasn’t until university that I finally figured out the true reason why I wanted to be a doctor. I was once a sixteen-year-old college freshman, with a chip on my shoulder. I graduated as valedictorian of my class and I got into the Ateneo de Manila University (which was at the time the leading university in the Philippines). Life could not get any better for an arrogant teenager who had never tasted failure. I was determined to groom myself into someone that medical schools could not refuse. In my freshman year, I researched graduate medical schools, learnt what they looked out for in applications, and talked to seniors. I found three key criteria: academics, shadowing experiences and volunteer work. From there, I began on ticking the boxes on my CV. I made it to the Dean’s List every semester so I could get a Latin Honor when I graduated and began to email doctors and health care professionals to ask if I could shadow them. However, the most difficult part for me was the third component, volunteering.

Interestingly, about one third of our student population hold a Bachelor's degree in Engineering. One of our success stories, Dr Lim Kheng Choon, was a Mechanical Engineer in the Republic of Singapore Air Force before he joined us as a medical student at Duke-NUS. To futher spur on these group of "engineers turned medical students", an interest group MedTech has also been set up at Duke-NUS. In this blog post, we talk to Eric Cher, a current 2nd year student about his journey from engineering to medicine thus far.

We speak to a group of MD students to learn more about a health screen they conducted last year. By: Jonathan Caleb Quek, Bhavya Allena, Patrisha C. Lazatin and Aditya Subramaniam

Project Dove, the Duke-NUS Overseas Volunteering Expedition, organized annually by Duke-NUS medical students, aims to improve health efforts in the surrounding regions. Last month, our team of students and faculty conducted a 3-day mobile clinic and health education program for the underserved in the town of Lembang, located in the province of West Bandung, Indonesia. With the help of local translators, they provided health screening and treated common medical problems to the townsfolk, and educated children and teachers at an orphanage on personal hygiene and basic first aid skills.