"Didi Didi"...
The harsh alarm clock cut through the silent morning, and a figure suddenly rolled over from the bed and began to brush his teeth, wash his face, and pack his school bag quickly. On the mobile phone screen that suddenly lit up, it was suddenly displayed that it was only six o'clock in the morning, and the "examiner" had already left for the library. In the clinical medicine major of a university in the north, the number of graduate students in a class has reached almost 100%. In the dormitory, everyone was not alarmed on the surface, but in fact, the "roll" was surging and the smell of anxiety was everywhere.
According to the data, the number of applicants for master's degree students nationwide in 2022 will be 4.57 million, an increase of 800,000 over 2021, an increase of more than 21%. According to the "2021 China Undergraduate Employment Report" released by the Max Research Institute, from the perspective of the proportion of graduate students in various disciplines, the three disciplines of medicine, agriculture and science continue to occupy the top three in the graduate list, and the proportion of graduate students has exceeded 20% for three consecutive years, and has shown a continuous upward trend. Among them, the proportion of medical students has ranked first for three consecutive years. After all, for medical students, as long as they still want to be doctors, graduate school is almost a must.
Image source: Figureworm Creative
Small county hospital recruitment requires a postgraduate degree
"The current employment environment is like this, undergraduates can hardly find jobs, county hospitals have to start recruiting graduate students, and the top three hospitals in big cities require 'double first-class' university doctorates or even higher." Yang Hao, a fifth-year clinical medicine student, admitted that she went to graduate school so that she could have a job in the future, but the distance to find a "good job", such as going to the "third class" to be a doctor, in her opinion, a graduate degree is far from enough, "even the county hospital, all require a graduate degree." She said.
Graduate school may not be the only option for medical students, but few people can "jump out." Of the more than 30 students in Yang Hao's class, only one chose to take the civil service examination, and the others all chose to take the examination.
The job recruitment requirements released by the hospital's official website are also one of the main reasons for forcing medical students to go to graduate school.
The health community inquired about the official recruitment information of some hospitals, as follows:
A public hospital in Luoyang City
Recruitment position: clinical medicine major
Recruitment requirements: The minimum education is a specialty, clinical medicine major, and there is no limit to the title. Have a bachelor's degree or above in clinical medicine, fresh or previous graduates can be, and a qualified certificate of regular training is preferred.
Treatment: five insurance and one gold, 2000-5000 yuan. Negotiable is preferred.
A tertiary private hospital in Henan
Recruitment position: clinical medicine in various majors
Job requirements: fresh graduates. Bachelor degree or above, graduate student is preferred. Junior titles are required.
Treatment: Negotiable
A tertiary public hospital in Beijing
Recruitment position: Leader of the Mental Health Sciences Section
Job requirements: The age of non-Beijing hukou personnel is not more than 44 years old, and the Beijing hukou personnel can be appropriately relaxed; they have more than 10 years of work experience in tertiary hospitals; they have the senior professional titles they apply for, of which the real senior titles have the initial bachelor's degree or above, and the deputy senior titles have the initial master's degree or above; those who have national, municipal scientific research projects or scientific and technological progress awards at or above the provincial level are preferred under the same conditions.
Treatment: 8,000-20,000. Business establishment, five insurances and one gold, and beijing hukou settlement.
It is not difficult to see that some hospitals in non-first-tier cities may not have high academic requirements, but the same salary level will not be very high. Some of the top three hospitals are relatively good, and even solve the problem of household registration and establishment, but the requirements are also very high, and graduate students are the minimum academic requirements. In short, the higher the education, the more options available. "After five years of schooling, if you go to work in the county hospital after graduation and take a salary of thousands of yuan, you always feel that it is not proportional to your efforts in recent years." Yang Hao said.
She Yufeng also has the same idea, even if he did not re-enter the graduate school after graduating from undergraduate, but chose direct employment, but he believes that for medical students, as long as they still want to be doctors and want to find a "good job", graduate school is the only way. He also bluntly said that he did not rule out the possibility of re-entering the graduate school after that.
Si Xu, a senior consultant who has been working in the field of postgraduate planning for 8 years, said: "The reason why the number of medical students who have studied for graduate school has continued to rise in recent years is that in addition to the high employment threshold for medical students, which has led to a high examination and research rate, medical candidates who have lost in 'World War I' tend to throw themselves into 'World War II' or even 'World War III', which is also a very important reason."
Will it be harder and harder for medical students to go to graduate school?
Yang Hao applied for a master's degree in pharmacology at the College of Basic Medical Sciences of Jilin University, with a study system of 3 years and an enrollment of 10 people. The main task during the postgraduate period is to enter the clinical rotation, which can be understood as a regular trainee with a graduate degree. After three years, not only can you accumulate a certain amount of clinical experience, but you will also be able to get started faster after work. More importantly, you can get a graduation certificate, a degree certificate, a practicing physician certificate, and a training certificate "four certificates in one". Therefore, a master's degree is often the first choice for most graduate students. In contrast, the competition for master's degrees is also extremely fierce, and the admission ratio of some departments has even reached 30:1, which means that twenty or thirty students participate in the interview, and only one is admitted in the end.
Health industry inquiries on the official website of the Graduate Admissions Office of Jilin University found that the number of enrollments of the Basic Medical College of Jilin University in 2022 is 74, of which 11 people are recommended to study for graduate students (the quota of students accepted by the university will account for the announced enrollment quota, in addition to the description of the professional directory, the quota of the enrollment plan all includes the number of students who accept the exemption, and the number of students who are exempted from the university includes the number of students who accept the school and the number of students who are exempted from the university. ）
At present, the Research and Recruitment Network of Jilin University has not yet announced the number of applicants for each college, but according to the relevant staff of The Chinese Public Education, according to the experience of the admission data of the examination and research in previous years, the enrollment ratio of popular majors in Jilin University may reach 10:1 (the larger the enrollment ratio, indicating that the number of applicants is more than the number of people admitted, the more fierce the competition. Even higher. The health community has also noticed that there is only 1 graduate student exempted from the pharmacology major of Jilin University this year, which may mean that Yang Hao's competitive pressure is less than that of other majors.
For other majors, if the undergraduate study is not your favorite major, you can choose to take the interprofessional examination to adjust your future career direction. But medical students are limited by their professionalism and do not have the freedom to choose. According to the "2021 China Undergraduate Employment Report" released by the Max Research Institute, the proportion of undergraduate students in the class of 2020 who read and switch majors to graduate school is 26%, of which the proportion of inter-professional graduate studies in economics and management is higher, and the lowest in medicine, 44% and 12% respectively. In Si Xu's view, the reason why medical students are difficult to study for cross-professional examinations is related to the long training cycle of medical professionals and the characteristics of higher industries.
Speaking of the original intention of studying medicine, Yang Hao admitted that this was not voluntary. In the eyes of the previous generation, having a doctor in the family was a very safe thing, and her parents had the same idea - "The family has a headache and brain fever, and can help." She also thought about changing majors, "but she is too old." From a practical point of view, the training time of a medical student is as little as five years, as much as eight years, and eleven years (three years of regular training), so that a person can abandon many years of effort and start over in an unfamiliar field, which cannot be changed by one or two sentences of "chicken soup".
Si Xu judged that in the future, it will be more and more difficult for medical students to study for graduate school, mainly in the following factors: the number of colleges and universities that recruit medical master's degree students nationwide is much less than other disciplines, and the competition is fierce; and the professional courses of medical students to study for the examination are the national unified examination, with higher professional requirements and greater difficulty in preparing for the examination; in addition, the number of enrollments is slowly increasing, far lower than the growth rate of the number of applicants; the proportion of pushing and dismissing is further increased, and the number of places in the unified examination is squeezed out, etc., which make it more difficult for medical students to study for graduate school than other professional students.
Where have all the medical graduates gone?
According to a research report released by Oriental Wealth Securities, there were a total of 830,000 medical graduates nationwide in 2019, of which only 9.0% were master's students.
In the journal The Lancet, a study analyzing China's health yearbook published by the National Health and Family Planning Commission from 2005 to 2015 found that in these 10 years, Chinese universities trained 4.7 million medical graduates, while the total number of doctors increased by only 750,000.
As the "reserve army" of the medical team, the employment choices of medical students directly affect the balance of supply and demand in the medical talent market. According to the "2021 Chinese Talent Development Report" released by Lilac Garden Lilac Talents, 65.2% of medical students have considered changing careers, accounting for two-thirds of the total number, of which 11.7% said that they would not choose their major at all.
For a long time, the medical field has been a gathering place for high-end talents, and the growth of medical students is also very challenging, and the "5+3+X" training model is the only way for medical students to grow into doctors.
In this year's fire variety show "Heartwarming Offer", Zhang Qia, a medical graduate student at Zhejiang University, once said that the exam that scared him the most was "Clinical Comprehensive Skills Training". This course requires familiarity with the theoretical knowledge of many courses of "Internal and External Women and Children", and the word count of the textbook has reached 5.97 million, which is far greater than the sum of the four famous works.
After surviving the difficult and long road to advancement, why do medical students resolutely choose to change careers when they graduate?
"An undergraduate degree is just a starting point for the medical system, not even an introduction." Zhao Yu, who is currently engaged in medical insurance business in pension insurance institutions, said frankly.
After five years of preparation, but finally did not become a doctor, he said that he was helpless, "In my senior year, I had to intern in the hospital and prepare for the graduate school, which was really lacking."
In order to have more time to review and prepare, he embezzled a lot of time after the examination and research time, and also tried 28 days of classes, but the result was that he failed to pass the examination, which meant that he was not eligible for the top three hospitals.
Li Heng, an attending physician in the Department of Nephrology of a third-class hospital in Beijing, also pointed out that "in first-tier cities, if there is no local household registration, it is still very difficult to enter the top three hospitals to find a corresponding job", he said that due to practical considerations, some peers can only turn to other fields related to medicine.
The reason for the change of career is also very helpless.
The "2021 Chinese Development Report" shows that more than 60% of medical students consider changing careers, in addition to the mismatch between salary and payment, and the excessive workload, the tense doctor-patient relationship is also an important factor for them to consider changing careers. The dislike of the medical industry accounted for only 11% of the total. In other words, many objective factors are the reason for the loss of doctors' resources.
A large number of medical students are considering switching careers,
What can I do after changing careers?
"In the field of Internet medical treatment, the demand for medical professionals is relatively large", in Zhao Yu's view, after graduating from undergraduate, he did not become a doctor, but turned to the Internet medical track, engaged in medical insurance payment method reform related business, changed a track, and also escorted China's medical care.
It is not uncommon for medical students to change careers, but the professions they have pursued after abandoning medicine are rarely mentioned. "Among my classmates, 80% choose to become doctors, and the rest are either engaged in Internet medicine and become medical editors; or in the field of traditional medicine, they become medical representatives; and some do clinical trial review work in pharmaceutical companies." Talking about the contradiction between the cognition that 80% of medical graduates are still doing doctors and the shortage of overall doctor resources, Li Heng, a nephrologist, told the health community that this is caused by the difference between schools and majors, and the top medical colleges will have more students engaged in the majors they have studied.
The change of medical students means starting over, but what suits them is the best, and it is to balance between ideal and reality to achieve an optimal solution.
Ming Pei Yizhong's "Preface to Speech and Medicine" said: "Those who do not learn through the present and the ancient times, who do not understand the heavens and men, who are not close to immortals, whose hearts are not close to Buddhas, who prefer to cultivate the fields and weave cloth for clothing, food, and ears, must not be used as a doctor to mislead the world!"
It can be seen that the public's cognition and expectation of the healers have learned from ancient and modern times, understood the heavens and the people, and are close to the immortals and the heart is close to the Buddha. The almost "harsh" requirements also make medical students prohibitive, just as every year when the college entrance examination is volunteered, some people will present the slogan of "persuading people to study medicine, the sky thunders", so as to do a good job in psychological construction for many candidates.
After full understanding, the choice of the medical industry must be a great enthusiasm for treating diseases and saving people, and this enthusiasm will also be the motivation for medical students to persevere and eventually become excellent doctors.
(At the request of the interviewees, Yang Hao, She Yufeng, Zhao Yufeng, Li Heng are pseudonyms)
Source | The health community
Written by | Wang Dandan Zhou Chunxue