Fauji Foundation and Shifa are better choices for you living in Islamabad. You should wait it out for their lists.
As far as NUMS is concerned, I don't really get the hype around it. Why do people fancy It? I mean why do people think that an institute run by army is naturally better.
Well to be honest, I have seen graduates of CMH struggling quite a lot to settle outside CMH when they graduate. During their 5 years, they live in a bubble of uniformed people and an isolated society with a limited network, as soon as they pass out from the college to pursue jobs elsewhere they struggle due to lack of PR, recommendations and networking. Many students of CMH can't settle outside CMH because they live in isolation there. And with its affiliation with NUMS, they have gotten even more isolated.
It's not like Army is going to hire them for the rest of their lives. There are limited residency positions in CMH and CMH is under financial constraints since the last 1 year or so, because of which they have even stopped hiring their own graduates for residency positions. The consultants and faculty of CMH is hardly known outside the Army set up and most of their professors in clinical years are uniformed people with no teaching experience.
I don't know why people fancy army so much when the graduates will ultimately be working in a civilian set up for the rest of their lives. And being in an army set up kind of puts them at a disadvantage after they graduate because they have no idea how the real life set up where they will eventually end up working is actually like.
Most graduates hence struggle after they graduate. Plus clinical experience in a military hospital is generally mediocre. You can't compare it with the likes of Shalamar which has now become a semi government hospital in which 50% cases are totally free and the rest are either insurance cases or cases with absolute nominal government charges. Shalamar is also attached with Fauji Foundation Hospital Lahore which is 100% free.
So to be honest, I don't get the hype around NUMS. For a person like me who is now doing residency after graduating, the graduates of NUMS affiliated colleges are clinically weak and mediocre at best. And they generally struggle if they can't make it in PLAB or USMLE which not more than 5 to 6 people in a class do. If they end up doing FCPS here in Pakistan, they struggle. Most of them don't even go into clinical practice. So in all honesty, I don't get the hype at all.
You definitely know better than I do, and I find all the above mentioned points logical. I guess the hype is more about CMH Lahore rather than NUMS. And maybe it is so because those who are not linked to this profession have heard more about CMH than Shalamar. I don’t really know the difference between the degrees UHS and NUMS, but I do know that for now, UHS is considered better. To be honest, I was upset that maybe I won’t be able to make it to MBBS in CMH, but whatever you said has made me happy and relieved that I got a call from Shalamar.
Honestly, people don't make relevant calculated choices pertaining to the profession they are about to choose. If I ask most of the aspiring candidates for admissions, most of them would be joining CMH just because they think it's "cooler" or has a certain class going into it. What they don't realise is that there are numerous problems associated with a military set up. NUST is a different case as engineering is basically lab oriented and teachers are all civilians and even it's campus is far from a military set up. However when it comes to medicine an isolated set up puts the students at a much bigger disadvantage in the long run.
Basically, the mentality of students from an isolated set up is dangerous. Where you will see a graduate from Shalamar working in BHU, THQ, RHC to FCPS residency in Tertiary care all over the country but also in top hospitals in both UK and US. They are trained to work in all sorts of set ups nationally and abroad while graduates of CMH generally struggle outside the confines of a military hospital. Those fortunate enough to go abroad are fine (Those are not more than 5 to 6 per year in a class of 150 or so), while rest either do nothing after house job or try passing the FCPS exam and apply for residency only in CMH and from the last one year even CMH hasn't accommodated it's own graduates. And apart from that, CMH doesn't keep their own graduates as priority. They give priority to their ranked officers first, then wives of ranked officers and then comes the graduates. And hardly a couple of training spots come up every year and it puts the graduates into a serious disadvantage. Honestly, either they are scared to step outside their comfort zone that is the confines of CMH or just plain inability to prove themselves elsewhere. Its professors in the clinical side are hardly known outside the boundaries of CMH and due to their disconnection from the outer world generally, they can't even recommend their graduates or guide them about anything outside CMH.
The teachers in the clinical years in CMH are those people who are posted from here and there and have almost no undergraduate teaching experience at all. So basically as a person who is in the field truly believe that the hype around CMH is only because it's "cooler".
Honestly speaking despite CMH being an army institute, the level of discipline, strictness regarding education is much more in Shalamar than CMH.
I'll tell you what, in Shalamar if you can't compete with the rest of your class and keep your grades above 50% and attendance above 75% you'll most likely be debarred from appearing in the final exam as the college believes in producing the best that they can and don't allow non serious Or lacklustre students to compete in the finals because ultimately they'll be playing with human lives. This policy in the past has scared away many "cooler" kids in the past and will still do but being a physician myself I think Shalamar groomed us in a way that we can compete at any level and believe that our college's policy was the best in our own interest.
It's about human lives. You can't just allow mediocre students to graduate from your college. That is why the standards and the quality of education at Shalamar is the highest among all the private medical colleges in the province. Although as students we were always fussed up about the tests and keeping up with her assessments but that ultimately made us competitive and to respect this profession.
Apart from all that, Shalamar is still the best not in terms of curricular but extra curricular as well. Last year alone the college had 3 intercolleagiate events, 2 concerts of Call The Band and RDB, 4 5 intercolleagiate events and there is always something going on the college to keep the students fresh.
What else can a student possibility want?
And I don't need to prove that it's faculty and patient exposure is the best among all the private medical colleges in the province.
Anyways it's your own choice but it's been years I have been on this forum and I seriously don't get the hype around CMH. And since I'm in practice now, it just perturbs me even more that people prefer "cooler" to "quality education".
I hope things go good for me as well. Anyway, may I know your aggregate please, if you don’t mind?
