Doc Ahmad Hajiri

June 27, 2015 Assalamu Alaykum (Peace be upon you) and a blessed month of Ramadhan! Alhamdulillah, it’s exactly 10 days since I arrived home to Jolo (exactly a day before Ramadhan started :) Since my arrival, I have been working on three things: my summer immersion, my summer elective course and spending a productive Ramadhan with my family. What are those first two? Well, as many of you who personally knew me, I am part of UPCM’s Regionalization Program (RP) who are composed of medical students from the far flung regions in the country who will soon in sha Allah serve the community after graduation from medschool. We are known as the  “RP Students” and every summer vacation, you will find us going back to our community doing our “summer immersions”. We conduct a variety of activities during the said immersions: from conducting public health lectures to surveys on community baseline health data. After each immersion, we are then required to submit our summer im...

Assalamu Alaykum (Peace be upon you all) Last week was, if I could literally translate it, was indeed a "hell week" for us ICCs. We had our final exams on Pharmacology, Otorhinolaryngology (ORL), Ophthalmology, Pediatrics and NeuroPsychology, had our Annual Comprehensive exam (200 items presented in a time-allotted powerpoint slide) and our ever-dreaded Grand OSCE (stands for "Objective Structured Clinical Examination, something like a practical exams with different stations). After the last exam in Friday of that week, we were already in a "finally-its-over" mode until the results of the exams came in. Some of the students did not make it to the passing rate of some station sin the OSCE and so they have make up for their grades. I failed in two of the stations (Psychology and Pedia: Vaccinations station). That afternoon we finished the "repeat exam" for the Psychology station, Alhamdulillah we all passed. The repeat rotation for pediatrics was s...