Friday, October 07, 2005

Graduation Thesis

I said in the last blog that I should write about scientific work in the faculty of medicine.
Every 6th year student has to present a graduation thesis before the end of the year, otherwise they cannot graduate. I believe the same applies to every university student. But in medicine there is a new trend in doing this. When I finished 7 years ago, almost everyone was translating something from English to Arabic, usually a textbook or a handbook or anything else. There is no creativity included, and there is no real supervision. As 23 year old students who have not dealt with English beyond reading some medical textbooks and language courses, we are not really equipped to do proper translation. Anyway, we did what we did and presented the thesis (a translation) and the reviewing doctor have not bothered himself surely to fix any errors (which I have no doubt they existed). What's more is that after 3 years when my brother was about to finish his medical school, he and a bunch of his friends took some parts of the things we translated and never saw light, and presented it as their thesis. I don't blame them or anyone else as it is useless to go through the same waste of time twice.
Anyway, being abroad and being involved in medical writings and research have opened my eyes. It doesn't take a lot to produce some good scientific work. We have numerous "professors" (or so they are called, sometimes with no right) as faculty. It only takes that each at least gets six students and asks them to answer a question within his specialty (e.g. effect of antibiotics on viral infections...) or case reports with a review. It doesn't have to be a new question, it doesn't have to be unpublished before, and it doesn't have to be of a basic or clinical research quality (because we don't have these abilities yet here).
Students should have to browse the WWW for articles and trials, they should look up medical references and have a constant interaction with there tutors. I am not sure how rich is our medical library right now (and I should make a visit), but with the ridiculous amount of money the university gets from lateral education (التعليم الموازي) they can have a splendid one with most new textbooks.
Eventually, work of publishable quality can be submitted to peer reviewed journals (whether in English or Arabic). Others can be published in a periodical sponsored by the university itself to make this work available to others and not be left dusty on the shelves of our "beloved" library.

PS. I was asked to translate some work into Arabic, and it is very hard to do that, in addition it doesn't sound right. The Arabic language of medicine is so weird to my ears now that I support a total change to English teaching of this field in our universities.

1 Comments:

At Sat Oct 08, 02:35:00 PM GMT+2, Blogger GraY FoX said...

same problem goes along with the IT major .... actually.... whether it's presented in arabic or in english here in syria .... it will take us nowhere.... cuz we are OLD FASHIONED ITs ...

 

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