Doctors without Clarity: The State of Indian Students at the Medical Universities in Former USSR Bloc Countries

Proceedings of The 4th World Conference on Research in Teaching and Education

Year: 2022

DOI:

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Doctors without Clarity: The State of Indian Students at the Medical Universities in Former USSR Bloc Countries

Hrishikesh Inguva Venkata Sai Lakshmi MA, M.Ed

ABSTRACT: 

According to the Indian Embassy website in Moscow, it is mentioned that around 5000 Indian students are enrolled at Russian Universities, mostly for studying human medicine but many also go to Russia to pursue engineering and specifically aeronautics related fields. Russia has never been a popular choice amongst Indian students aspiring to pursue higher education abroad. According to an India today magazine article, the most popular choices for Indian international students to pursue higher education are in North America, Western Europe and Australia respectively. But there is scope for Indian students in Russia. Everything from the admission process to the quality of education and life while in the country are quite different and unique compared to the popular choices mentioned above. In this paper, I am focusing on the living and learned experiences of Indian medical students in Russian medical universities. Medicine is took up as profession for various reasons and in this paper, I am going to explore in detail, the causes behind every reason stated by the current students whom I have interviewed who are studying in different medical universities across Russia. My aim is to find out why they have chosen Russia to pursue their higher studies. As my own argument in the paper, I will try to relate the experiences of students to showcase how cultural and gender based violence are involved behind the scenes. The second argument I am going to make is that medical profession is a holistic profession and students need to feel a genuine calling and passion towards the profession to succeed in it later on, medicine is not purely based on reason and logic and a student needs to be intuitive beyond an average person to work under such strenuous conditions in a pain filled environment like a hospital. Lastly my third argument is that healthcare has been turned into an industry and any industry by default works for its own profits more than for the welfare of the people and their greater good. Even if they are providing vital care in life threatening situations, every step of the way has been commercialized in today’s time which is consequently degrading the comprehensiveness of the medical profession overall.

keywords: Indian medicos in Russia, Doctor, Cultural Violence, Relativism, Parental Pressure, Stigma, Mental Health, Foreign Education, Practicing medicine as a business, Motivations, Causes, Intentions, Masculine Hegemony, Cross-cultural barriers, Study Abroad Agencies, Grounded theory, Systemic social injustice, lack of conscience.