8 Years down the Line; the Uncertainties of Life after College

Greetings, dear reader.

It feels good to write again. Having had difficulties putting up an article last Friday, I managed to throw in one on Sunday and it was available as text on request. That was just a quick note for those who were about to stone me for not writing last week.

I felt motivated to write this article as it directly relates to the highs and lows of my life after college as today is the day after the 8th anniversary of the beginning of my journey into the medical profession. It was on that 6th day of the month of December in the year 2010 that I and 193 others walked into the gates of the College of Medicine and registered as a medical student with dreams of a rosy life after college. 8 years down the line, I am sure I am not speaking for myself only when I say that we are all lost in the technicalities and politics of the medical field.

Most find it shocking when I tell them that being a doctor was never my initial dream. Having seen the exploits of Edmond Kachale, one of the best computer programmers in the land, I was geared to get into the same field of computer programming and to be an excellent programmer. You might be wondering as to what sort of accident might have happened for a coder to switch lanes and end up performing caesarian sections at the Gogo Chatinkha Maternity Wing. Well. MSCE happened and upon realizing that my grades were that good and they could easily get me into medical school, family and friends mounted lots of pressure for me to join. I succumbed to the pressure partly because it came from all angles of my inner circle and partly because I had seen some pictures of the College of Medicine that were projected by a team of then COM students (Dr Stephen Macheso, Dr Kondwani Katundu, Dr Arnold Kapachika, Dr Clifford Banda and Dr Emmanuel Banda) who came to give us a motivational talk. I aced the university entrance examinations and the 6th was the day.

We were welcomed to the college on the first day of orientation by Dr Chiwoza Bandawe, who welcomed us to what he called the “rest of our lives”. This was one statement I took lightly but lately it has come back to me as I realized that in as much as the first day of joining college marks a new beginning, most intellectuals do not give a serious thought to life after college. This is particularly worse for those who get into medical programs as there is an almost set career path which under normal circumstances people hardly deviate from.

When you do medical school for 6 academic years, you go for your in-service training for 18 months. After successfully completing the training for the said months, one is ready for deployment to the districts before coming back to the central hospitals for specialization or doing other postgraduate trainings. “And they lived happily ever after..” This is pretty much the same for the other core undergraduate programs, where people think that jobs are almost guaranteed for everyone who passes through the hands of mother COM.8 years after starting my foundation year, however, I have discovered that what once was an almost flawless career path has been marred by a lot of politics and technicalities that have demanded evolution and adaptation for the every person who is joining the medical profession on the premise of guaranteed jobs and job security (and those who push others into the profession with the same idea in mind).

In one talk he gave, one of the keepers of the profession in Malawi, Prof Adamson Muula once narrated how having finished examinations on a Thursday, their class started internships four days later on the next Monday. Over the years, this period has exponentially increased to months and new graduates from the medical school have been hired after constant application of pressure from various stakeholders over the years. The transition from medical school to deployment to the districts has also been very difficult and lately we all might have heard of the 80 unemployed doctors sitting at home and awaiting government. For those who graduated in with degrees in pharmacy and physiotherapy and completed their internships, it is pretty much the same story and the ordeal is even much worse for those who study laboratory sciences to whom the government has made no commitment to hire despite the chronic lack.

One might wonder as to why I am talking about all this and I can sense that most would think that I am doing this in the spirit of advocacy. Contrary to that, I am writing about all this in a bid to spread the message of preparation for life after college for those who are in different colleges and for those who at some point send or will send their wards to college. The reason I am using my own experiences and the College of Medicine as an example emanates from my familiarity with the college and the fact that the college is one of the few in the country, graduates from which are taken as very marketable on the job market. The change of winds in the ease of employment for a medical graduate entails that graduates from other fields will be finding it even harder to secure employment or start up their own businesses and while this may sound negative, it is good to take it positively and let it inform preparation for life after college.

In finances, most people get through college having a constant source of income for their upkeep. However, there is a certain stretch in a graduate’s life that most of us do not like to pay attention to and that is the period between graduating and securing a job. In this period, most young people suffer and break down from the double burden of being broke and being unemployed. If one happens to be in college, here is one thing that has to be thought through from the early days.
Unemployment is on the rise in this country and conventional job hunting methods may not work in the modern day. The modern day intellectual needs to act like a mole burrowing through stuff to explore new opportunities and to create networks that will in turn help in securing jobs or getting business opportunities.

Among the major things that most of us overlook during our lives in college are issues of spiritual life after college and marriage. Most of the people who subscribe to Christian and Islamic faith are fairly spiritual and morally upright while in college but it is not a strange thing to see moral breakdowns after college. Similarly, it is not strange to see people who graduated with excellent grades not doing well in family life. College hardly explicitly prepares us for marriage but it is (rather objectively) one of the best settings to start out on such a journey. Reason? It is the time before people accumulate papers and money and that is the best time when people can get to know and build one another towards marriage. This is as opposed to what may happen to when someone graduates as an engineer; to whom potential spouses may flock, not for the real love but for the financial returns and security. Perhaps those who are still passing through tertiary education should give a serious thought to this and the fact that utsogoleri wa ku CCAPSO should go beyond the campus and translate leadership in the church out here.

I could have written more but that would have made my piece undesirably long. All in all, we are still here 8 years down the line. We are not driving as we anticipated but I guess that will be sorted with time. We are yet to get married and participation in church is not as good as we thought it would be, but I guess time will sort that too. College prepared us but I am left with the question of whether it prepared us well enough for the uncertainties of life after graduation.