My name is Rucha Magare. I am a 26-year-old foreign MBBC graduate from Satara, Maharashtra. I come from a middle-class family that took out a loan to fund my medical education, the kind of loan that takes a decade to repay, because they had one dream: that their daughter would become a doctor.
That dream took me to Lincoln American University in Guyana. My medical training was assessed by local Guyanese doctors and American-trained faculty through both multiple choice questions (MCQs) and objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs), the same clinical skills assessment format used to certify doctors across the world. I passed.
Separately, I sat for the Professional and Linguistic Assessments Board (PLAB) Part 1 examination, the licensing exam that allows foreign-trained doctors to practise in the UK. It is based on a healthcare system entirely different from the one in which I trained, and I cleared it on my very first attempt.
I am telling you this not to boast, but because I need you to understand what comes next. If I could pass PLAB 1 on my first try, testing me on a system I had never worked in, then I was never an incapable candidate.