Dear medical students,
Welcome to the new academic year. I hope you enjoyed your summer vacations and I hope you gained new energy for your studies.
As you know, we continue to emphasize the quality of your education. We appreciate the increasing demand of young people interested to attend our school but only those with the highest score at the admission exams were accepted.
We have launched the ‘Operation Spring Cleaning’ [photos, text in Czech] to prepare our premises the best for this academic year. It consists of several steps, some of them have been finished, some are still to be completed during the year. Thanks to the financial help that we received from the Motol University Hospital we have managed to make the lecture halls in the Motol University Hospital nicer and cleaner. As you can imagine, some of the tasks that are trivial at home (like window cleaning) were more demanding in the lecture halls. It was worth the effort – e.g., windows and curtains have not been cleaned for at least 20 years. I believe you will enjoy studying in the ‘Spring-Cleaned’ lecture halls.
The first year students enter the new European Credit Transfer System. In ECTS, students who fail to complete the exams will no longer be allowed to repeat the year. Instead, they can apply to take the limited number of subjects (exams) to the next year. Exceeding the limit of uncompleted subjects results in terminating the study. So please, study hard to avoid problems several months from now.
The ‘Big Brother/Sister’ system has been introduced recently and the newcoming students have the opportunity to use it. Please let us know your opinions on how the system works and your suggestions what should be done differently next year.
Overall, 85 international and 145 Czech students are in the first year, (last year it was 67 and 195, respectively). Lower total number of accepted students will help us to provide high quality training, especially in clinical medicine.
I have pointed out to the teachers that the exams must be handled in a just way and there must be no room for cheating. All students must have the same opportunity and we will not tolerate any break of this rule. As you know, the best international students will be awarded by receiving half of their tuition back.
Your opinion is important to me and to the board of the Dean! We would like to meet with you during the autumn. We will discuss overall issues as well as specific study subjects. Soon there will be web questionnaires on all subjects – same as we have prepared for the Czech students.
We want to help you with learning Czech language. One of the major tasks for the newly appointed Head of the Department of Languages is to improve the Czech language classes. Your task is then to learn basic Czech in a way that you can communicate with patients.
I wish you a successful academic year 2006/07.
O. Hrušák
Dean
