Career choices of Malaysian medical students.

The history of medical education in Malaysia is a relatively short one. From 1905 until 1964, Malaysian doctors were trained either at the King Edward the VII Medical College in Singapore or overseas in other Commonwealth countries. In 1964, the Faculty of Medicine was set-up in the University ofMalaya in Kuala Lumpur and admitted its first class of 46 students (Faculty of Medicine, University of Malaya-1975). Since then, the admission rate has increased to 126 each year. Students graduate after a five-year integrated course. A total of over 1,200 students have graduated with the Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery degrees since 1969. During this decade, the graduates have gone on to careers in Medicine ranging from open-heart surgery to immunology, psychiatry and general practice. Some have done so by design, others by circumstance and yet others by accident. No doubt, some have gone on to non-medical careers. However, figures of who went where into what are understandably difficult to obtain in a developing country especially as there has been a fairly free flow of medical graduates worldwide in the seventies.