Medicine is a journey to life-long learning with healthcare professionals constantly expected to remain relevant and provide safe and effective patient care.

This echoes the goal of RCSI and UCD Malaysia Campus (RUMC) to maintain the international reputation and quality of its graduates.

RUMC recently celebrated the academic excellence of Dr Por Chia Yin who was named Valedictorian and awarded the prizes for First Place in Surgery, Psychiatry, Family Medicine, and Forensic and Legal Medicine at RUMC’s 22^nd Conferring Ceremony, where she and her cohort of 91 medical doctors were conferred.

Chia Yin was born in Penang into a family of doctors. Her father, Dr Por Swee Liang is a general practitioner who runs his clinic in Penang. She completed her secondary education at Convent Green Lane (CGL) and tertiary education at Inti International College Penang before pursuing her medical degree with RUMC.

The newly-conferred graduate has been exposed to the life of a medical doctor from a very young age. She often shadowed her father in his community-based clinic and watched him going the extra mile to make a difference in his patients’ lives. She was greatly inspired to take on the pathway to becoming a doctor by her father who is well-respected within the community for his service and dedication.

Chia Yin began her transnational journey in Medicine at RUMC in September 2017 when she flew to Dublin with her coursemates for their pre-clinical years. She was allocated to University College Dublin (UCD) where she did her pre-clinical training for the first 2 ½ years.

Throughout her time in Dublin, she recalled some of her fondest memories – from the well-guided cadaver dissection session in the first year of medical school to travelling across European countries such as Austria, Greece, Hungary and more. She was a Stage 2 and Stage 3 scholar in UCD and also the NUI Dr H H Stewart Scholarship Nominee and Representative.

Having gained comprehensive training in Dublin, she returned to her hometown, Penang in 2020 to continue her clinical years. It was time to translate all the pre-clinical theories and knowledge into practice for the remaining 2 ½ years. Though the transition was quite challenging, Chia Yin enjoyed her bedside teachings as doctors at the teaching hospitals treated them equivalent to housemen, making the training even more valuable.

One of her most memorable experiences at the hospital during clinical training includes receiving praise from patients for being very thorough during history-taking and helping with translation for the ones with language barriers.

“While being named the valedictorian is a humbling honour, personally, I do not need or want to be remembered as just that. Instead, it would make all the difference to me if, in the near future, a patient walks into the room and requests for me to be the attending physician, because of the trust placed in me as a doctor who would always try her very best to make a difference in her patients’ lives” – said Chia Yin, as she concluded her Valedictorian speech at RUMC’s Conferring Ceremony in early June 2022.