Diez años de formación médica: una estudiante tanzana en el Tongji Medical College

The decision

Ana applied successfully for a Chinese Government Scholarship immediately after finishing secondary school and was admitted to Tongji Medical College at Huazhong University of Science and Technology. She was one of 26 Tanzanian students in that intake and the only woman among them.

Her account of the decision is candid about the family negotiation behind it: her father saw it as a chance to broaden her horizons while her mother worried about her living so far away. What settled it was her own assessment that the opportunity was rare and she could not waste it.

The first year

Arriving in Wuhan from Tanzania, the adjustment involved language, food, teaching style and coursework at the same time. She describes the first period as difficult and credits the friends, classmates and teachers around her, along with the other international students in her intake, with getting her through it.

Her specific advice on this point is that the language barrier is the hardest part and that everything else becomes manageable fairly quickly. She also notes that being able to speak some Chinese made an immediate practical difference in clinical settings — communicating with classmates and with patients.

What her supervisor saw

Her doctoral supervisor, who had supervised many international students in obstetrics and gynaecology, described her as more diligent than most, sometimes working harder than domestic students, and noted that she asked questions in class and could work independently in the laboratory.

The specific observation is worth recording because it describes exactly what a research supervisor is looking for: mastery of the basic laboratory techniques expected of a master's-level student, achieved by a student working in a second language. Her supervisor described being surprised at how well she had done on a set of results she brought to him.

What ten years produced

Her account describes a change in temperament as much as an education: the student who cried on arrival became markedly more independent and more proactive about her family as well, asking about conditions at home and looking for ways to help, during the phone calls back to Tanzania.

For applicants considering a long clinical programme in Chinese, the honest reading of this account is that it is a decade-long commitment in which the language and cultural adjustment is a substantial part of the work — and that a strong peer group in the same intake is one of the things that makes it survivable.