It’s been months since we last posted on International Medics and a lot has happened for both of us during this time.
International Medics initially started with the aim of bridging the informational gap international students experience when applying to Medicine, hence we focussed a lot on UK medical school admissions. However, as we progressed in our training, we became interested in other areas and although we wanted to talk about these topics, it conflicted with what we had already done and did not seem to do very well with our audience. We had to take some time to reconsider what International Medics would stand for and to “rebrand”, for the lack of a better word.
Meanwhile, we had other commitments on top of our studies so we decided to take some time off before our final exams in 2nd year and come back to International Medics when the exams were over for a fresh start. Jean put in some applications for committee roles/summer studentships (and got rejected for most of them), got involved with some research projects, finally decided to apply to intercalate next year, and thankfully, passed 2nd year.
As for Thinzar, she became interested in medical education and decided to get involved in teaching. She applied to be a teacher for LearnMedicine next year so you might see her giving lectures on their platform and helping students with revision! On top of that, Thinzar is thinking of relocating to another country after medical school (this is not certain yet) so she has been busy researching that. For this upcoming year, Thinzar will be taking a break from International Medics.
As Thinzar decided to take a step back from International Medics, the cost of the website domain and hosting would’ve been too much for Jean to afford on her own, on top of the cost of a personal website that she had been planning to build. Hence, we decided not to renew the subscription for the website and to transfer all the blog posts that we have produced to a dedicated page on Jean’s personal website.
As for our Instagram page, we found that the way Instagram is designed makes it very difficult for our content to actually reach the people who need it the most: people who did not know that social media could be a useful tool to find out about applying to medicine as an international student and being an international medical student in the UK.
There’s a huge race for numbers on Instagram, combined with overdone content and a very closed-off community. For example, we have had people approach us to ask us to boost the reach of their posts/take part in follow loops when they: 1. Don’t know what we do and 2. Don’t interact with us at all on our work. Also, we feel that our followers are not benefitting from our posts because most of them are medics themselves and not students applying to medical school.
It was very tough for us to come to this decision but our website now does not exist anymore (all posts can be found on https://www.jeanlingtan.com/international-medics). We will be keeping our Instagram account open, though it won’t be as active as it once was. Hopefully one day International Medics will be back as a duo and we hope that our content has been of use/interesting to you in one way or another. Best of luck with all your future undertakings!
Lots of love,
Thinzar and Jean.