Many roads to Melbourne

“In Sudan I was born into war and I saw how very bad it is when a society does not have doctors,“Garang Dut says.

“I’ve seen people from international health backgrounds risking their lives going into war zones to save people so I thought I can contribute to society by being a doctor.”

That journey began with a scholarship to a high school in Kenya in Lodwar, a town near the refugee camp, Sunshine College on arrival in Australia followed by Biomedicine at Monash University.

Josh Anderson’s final years of secondary school saw him an eyewitness to the debate surrounding the introduction of the Melbourne Model, which he entered as an Arts student.

“There was obviously a degree of nervousness for the people in my year level about the arrival of the Melbourne Model – not that it would go badly – just an anxiety that everyone knew all the details of what would be taking place,” Josh Anderson recalls.

“The results have been very good – the University has put a lot of time, effort and resources showing you the various options you have at the postgraduate level and the guaranteed pathway stream makes a big difference and gets rid of a lot of uncertainties.”

Both agree having a first degree has been a significant advantage in preparing them for a professional qualification.

“Medicine is a hard thing to study so it is an advantage to have gone through an undergraduate education first,” Mr Dut says.

“After that you are ready to study anything because you know how to study well and what difficulties you may face. I think we are better prepared through undergraduate education than if we came straight out of high school and into Medicine.

“Coming with a mature mind as well you have had life experiences that would help your education. In the course we have people who have qualified in different fields and some have had clinical experience, some as physiotherapists and some as pharmacists, so it’s a great mix in the course now and people are able to help each other from different perspectives.”

Mr Anderson was impressed by the range of subjects he could study in his Arts degree, being able to maintain his study of Indonesian and believes a full undergraduate degree prior to entry to the postgraduate professional degree is superior to the condensed Arts/Law combined degrees he had originally envisaged completing.

“The class environment in Law is very different from what I was accustomed to in the sense that it is a really interactive experience in the classroom,” he says.

“So instead of being the undergraduate model where the lecturer just stands up in front of the class and teaches you the fundamentals of what you need to know, it’s quite different where it’s expected that by pre-reading you have learnt all of the content or at least visited it before the class.

 “The emphasis in the lecture is then about making connections and taking your knowledge to a higher level rather than just going over the basics. It makes the course more demanding for students but it is an improved educational experience as a result.”

Out of this intensity, both have noticed the emergence of a strong sense of group identity.

“There is definitely a cohort mentality in terms of people being the first group in the course now and also because the course has been able to bring together people from different educational backgrounds,” Mr Dut says.

“They are not being picked from high school – they actually have more experience in life and more experience in different areas related to or not related to medicine which I think is a good part of the model.”

Mr Anderson says Melbourne Law School actively fosters the sense of group.

“We are in cohorts of about fifty, the Law Students Society organised an orientation camp and we even have our own lockers,” he says.

This diversity and maturity translates to effective use of briefing documents available through student centres allowing students to get to the heart of their upcoming lectures and tutorials where they can then develop the detail.

“It’s a great way of studying and getting ready for tutorials or coming back to revise after them – you need to grasp the bigger picture and you can deal with the finer detail later,” Mr Dut says.

“This is especially important now because people are coming from various educational backgrounds where they are strong in some education sections and maybe weaker in others and you need to explore which area you need to study more.”

Mr Dut says he believes he will be well prepared to make an informed decision on where his career will head, with a PhD in public health an increasing possibility.

Josh Anderson says he is keeping his eyes open and exploring all of the options opening up for him as his course unfolds.