The MBBS course isn’t a summer-internship camp or a conference week. It’s a course of four and a half years! Add to that the years of your internship, post-graduation, etc. So it’s important to choose the right medical college for studying MBBS after clearing the NEET exam.
This is a guest post from Bristi Majumdar (MBBS student in Kolkata).
Before I begin, let me just make it known that the medical college you want to choose depends on a range of factors besides the fact itself that it is a ‘good’ medical college with a lot of patient inflow.
Factors to Consider When Choosing the Right Medical College :
- Whether your rank in the NEET-UG entrance exam will help you make it till there (This is the main deciding factor and is the most realistic deciding factor of all).
- Whether you are comfortable in studying outside your hometown and sharing a room with others in a hostel.
- Whether you are okay with the fact that the city of your college may be too far from your home.
- Whether it is only the college that matters to you or there are other factors that you want to take into account as well.
The last point is the most important of all. For me, ‘other factors’ did matter a lot, thus I chose to remain in my city and even though I would have got a chance of joining higher ranked governmental medical colleges outside my town.
Choosing a medical college in home state or outside
Before you choose a medical college, make sure you are mentally comfortable with the life you are about to choose. One of my classmates completed both his semesters of the first MB course in a college outside my town, but he was so homesick that he actually got a fresh admission again in the first year into the college I am studying in along with our batch. Another classmate went back home to Kota. He’ll wait for another year.
So make sure you are ready for this. I was not sure, so while prospecting the medical colleges I would include in my list, I excluded anything outside my state or 30 kilometers beyond my home.
Do your own research work about the medical colleges
It is extremely important to conduct a small research work before you fill your choices of desirable medical colleges in NEET counselling. I did conduct a research, however the official sites of the respective colleges sometimes fail to provide the information you are looking for.
So, make sure you check out their pages on the social networking sites, talk to seniors who are already in those colleges, have a talk with professors associated with the MBBS course and collect information about the residential and transportation facilities that the stay will entail.
Can you afford the fee of medical college?
Make sure you (your parents) can afford the cost because though most government colleges do not charge you much, there are private colleges which have seats reserved for students coming in with their ranks in NEET and though the fees for them are much more nominal than the students getting in through direct admission, it’s definitely way higher than that offered by government colleges.
How to Choose the Right Medical College in India for MBBS?
Professional things to consider when choosing the right medical college:
- Rank of the medical college in India – Opinions may vary, as well as the rank they given by different organisations and sites, but medical colleges are mostly ranked on the basis of 3 things – How old it is (hence how well it is known to patients), the patient inflow and variety of cases, and the number of seats available for the MBBS course.
- Availability of equipment – This is very important. You need to make sure that the college has adequate equipment (for example, instruments, lab requirements, cadavers, etc.) to cater to all the students. So in case you have to choose between two colleges closely spaced in their ranks, this should be one of the main deciding factors.
- Patient inflow – The number of patients is directly proportional to the number of types of cases you will get to witness. So a college with a hospital having more patients coming in definitely has more advantages (despite the chaos in the hospital grounds) because students get more hands-on practical work to do.
- Faculty – This isn’t something you should be worried about. All colleges have more or less good and highly knowledgeable professors. In fact, it does happen that the same professor may take lecture classes in different medical colleges in the same city or nearabouts. So, a particular group of teachers does not remain confined to a single college only. However, that is not the case for private colleges, though since the pay is higher there, students do receive more care.
- Location – This should be looked at in two ways. One, whether the college is in your city or outside, something which has already been spoken about. Two, the location of the hospital itself, because it depends on the transportation to and availability of the hospital that patients will be rushed to it.
However, in the end , it is your rank in NEET that matters and one is actually left with very little choice. So, choose wisely, don’t obsess over a specific medical college only, the MBBS course is mainly of the academics, which is more or less at par everywhere. Once you get admission into a medical college, consider yourself lucky that you have because it is a really tough competition.
All the very best!
