Excerpt from UDN News, April 2, 2023, translated by Haydn Chen
The trend and high demand of education program combining medicine and technology was very evident in this year’s university admissions in the National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU) Taiwan. For the first time, the acceptance rate of the Physician-Engineer (or Scientist) programs is much lower than the traditional Medical program by more than three-fold; they are 5% versus 17% respectively.
Admission to the medical school is very competitive every year, and it will be even more difficult to get into the NYCU Physician-Engineers (or Scientist) program this year. Dr. Albert Yang, Deputy Chairperson of the Department of Medicine of NYCU, pointed out that because students see the future direction of the integration of medicine and technology, from the analysis of the acceptance rate, the competition will be much fiercer. In terms of student quality, whether it is the traditional physician group, or the engineer (or scientist) group, the average admission scores are nearly the same with the traditional medical program slightly higher. Albert Yang pointed out that the mathematics, physics, chemistry tests of the engineer (or scientist) group require particularly strong admission scores in addition to a keen interest in biology.
Lin Chi-Hung, President of National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, said that the impact of scientific and technological progress on students’ choice of departments can be seen. This, he believes, is just the beginning. In the past, the combination of the Department of Medicine and the Department of Science, Engineering and Technology was said to be cross-domain, and the way of thinking of the Department of Medicine emphasized the inductive method, whereas the Department of Science and Engineering emphasized the deductive method, which was a completely different way of thinking. Now that the two fields are about to merge in the new trend of medicine-technology education, it is obviously insufficient to just let medical students study the electrical engineering and information technology courses only; there must have an large scale change of the mindset on learning, NYCU is aiming to overhaul the entire academic curriculum and clinical practice to enrich students with solid combination of medicine and technology knowledge in order to educate a new group of physicians for the innovative healthcare and smart medicine of the future.
PS. National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU) is to enter a MoU agreement with the Carle Illinois College of Medicine (CICOM), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). UIUC CICOM is the first medical school established with the technology-driven medical curriculum in the United States.
Source：Original post from April 7th news https://www.nycu.edu.tw/news/4612
