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“The purchase of equipment and the prestige motivated the launch of the English-language programme,” said Professor Ferenc Gallyas, Head of the UPMS Department of Biochemistry and Medicinal Chemistry, and Chair of the English Programme Committee, who has been involved in the management of the programme for 18 years, working as the Committee’s Secretary between 2006 and 2014, and as the Chair since 2014.

He recalled that from the mid-1970s, teachers could travel abroad and thus had language skills, but they did not have teaching materials in English at the time. By the end of the 1990s, a standardised system of training requirements had been established.

“From the very beginning, our goal was to attract students from as many countries as possible to Pécs. This was also important because if they came from the same place, they spoke to each other in their mother tongue, not in English. Today, this difficulty has been eliminated, and the number of international students exceeds that of Hungarian students. Now the aim is to keep the number of first-year students at 180 and improve the quality of the students,” said Dr. Ferenc Gallyas, who said it would be good if a representative system could be established in each country to filter out students who are admitted to the preparatory course.

He also spoke of India, Indonesia, and the Far East as new markets, as well as Africa, although the Medical School already has students from the latter continent in the frame of the Stipendium Hungaricum scholarship. Students from China prefer to apply for the dentistry training because the general medicine training is sufficient there, and those who still want to study abroad prefer to go to America or England. He said that students from 65 countries have come to the Medical School in Pécs during the 40 years of the English-language programme.

He explained that there is not much competition among Hungarian medical schools, but there is in the neighbouring countries, where there are now 110 institutions training doctors, and at a lower cost than in Hungary.

“The appeal of the training in Pécs is that it is real and practical. The students learn anatomy on real cadavers, they see real cases in pathology, just as the patients are real in the clinical training as well,” he said.

In the podcast, he also discussed the challenges of the future, highlighting two of them: clinical education in the face of increased student numbers, and knowledge transfer as students’ learning needs and habits change.

Photo:

Dávid VERÉBI