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.

Who should text first? The age-old question.

Dear reader,

On a normal day like this, I would write an article and the opening would be something to do with the day being a Friday. I woke up feeling like the day was a Monday or something of the sort. The lack of activity on the busy area I overlook when I am out for a stretch on a normal midday makes it even more confusing as it is highly suggestive of today being a Sunday. Anyway. We are here and we can only wonder what day it is. I do not believe that we should name days based only on what the previous ones were, by the way.

It feels good to be back to writing ways. I have always told people who take interest in the person behind the Friday articles that writing is my way of venting out my anger and frustrations and that it is only through this way that I minimize the fallout and collateral damage. I sometimes feel what I would call a blend of pride and guilt when people tell me they have seen themselves in my articles when in essence I was just writing about myself the whole way. It gives me the sense that I have stepped on the raw nerves I strive to avoid but at the same time makes me realize that I am not alone in the darkness of my suffering.

Enough of the self-pity.

Coming back to writing ways was always going to be a difficult thing for me. Even in the thick of political and social media drama the choice of an article was going to be a difficult one for me. At the end of the day, I chose to write something about what most people in relationships are struggling with. The question?

“Who should text the other first?”

While I may agree with the one who is whining that this is a very stupid topic, I must say that this might be important for a few after all. By the time we get to the end of the second A4 page we should be able to determine the criteria by which we should choose who should text the other first in a relationship. Let’s break the ground.

I must state here that I do not have that much of relationship experience. My stint with these things lasted a little over two years and I have since taken a two year break from them. Not much of CV for someone who should be trying to answer this complex question, if you think about it but such a time provided a good opportunity to observe and experience some stuff.

The genesis and lifespan of a 21^st century relationship has evolved to an extent that most of the stages pass by in an accelerated. People meet and they exchange numbers. Before you know it, they get to be all over each other, texting through the night. In a matter of days, some premature relationship is born. The texting dynamics then keep getting poorer until the relationship dies a natural death. Needless to say, relationships are still good and everybody needs one. Well. Almost everyone (we will explain that in another article, koma enanu mukhoza kupitiriza kudya kanundu ndi kudumpha ma sipikala a Jai Banda).

On the texting dynamics, most of these relationships which involve semi-independent young humans are sustained by online communication and Whatsapp becomes vital in the communication because with time people have become too lazy to call. For some reason, the owner of this application decided that it was good for people to see when last the person on the other end of the line was online should they not be active in the moment. That is a good feature and it helps create realistic expectations in terms of response times. On the other hand, the same good feature has become a burden to some people in love as it creates questions. Imagine waking up a little after sunrise and not finding a good morning bae (or whatever you call each other) text from your spouse who was last seen online at 5:30. Hurts, right? You will not admit but we both know that this has been an issue mu chibwenzi chanucho. Even when there is no “last seen” involved, there have always been some issues that have restrained people from being the first texter in relationships in which spouses once put their school or career on the line because of spending too much time online.

There are several determinants of who texts first from my observations and experience. The first one of these (rather stupidly) is about who was the last to text. Some people just feel like if theirs was the last text on the chat, the other has to ignite the next chat with the first text. Of course it sounds logical, sometimes. The second? Whoever comes online first after the last chat. And then there is this thing of agreement. “Ukamaliza kupanga zakozo holla at me on Whatsapp.” Good stuff.

All those scenarios and things sound pretty simple but they have been sources of trouble for young relationships. People have had serious headaches on why their loved ones did not text them despite having been online at some point or despite them being the last to text and this has led to the collapse of some relationships. At some point, a game of egos has led people into thinking that they were not going to start a chat if bae was not going to.

I have swam a good number of miles in these waters and over years I have realized that these small internal barriers to communication have catastrophic effects on human interaction. .. and that these games are pretty unnecessary for someone who is serious about communication, in a relationship or otherwise. In my view, anyone who is really serious about interaction and the building of meaningful interpersonal relationships should not take sending the first text as a burden. It is just “Hi!”, anyway. The unnecessary pride we harbor and allow to flourish make the punching of these four keystrokes look like a herculean effort and at the end of the day we end of losing people of great value in our lives because we wanted to nourish our pride.

Having stated all that, I think we can go back to answering the question that troubles many every morning and evening (at the peak texting hours). Who should be the one to text first? Is it the one who last uploaded a funny picture for a status update? While that may be the nearest answer in the contexts of our pride hearts, the answer to all this lies in how much value we put to communication and whoever is on the receiving end of the communication. When we put so much value on the person on the other end, texting becomes easy regardless of the other factors that may be at play.

From the experience corner, I can say that such egos have cost me some potentially profitable relationships. From the observation corner, most relationships are suffering because of such trivial issues. I will not bring in suggestions or action points into this. All I will say is that if you are really serious about communication or your relationships, you will not need much contemplation to send the first text. For the rest of you, continue to act the way you act. Your relationship will take the natural course and eventually you won’t be needing to crack your head on whether you should send the first text, anyway.

Woza Friyay!