University Of Buea: Working To Satisfy Employers

At 23, the University of Buea is continually opening up to foster research and respond to the job market.
 

The 23-year-old University of Buea, UB, has flung its doors open for the 2016/2017 academic year. Some 8,000 freshmen and postgraduate students made their debut in the campus of “The place to be” last 10 October. As a novelty, four new programmes have been introduced, including Performance and Visual Arts, Mechanical Engineering, Peace and Conflict Resolution. Noteworthy is the fact that UB now runs a Deoxyribo Nucleic Acid, DNA laboratory for the second year. It is expected to help in the investigation of serious crimes forensically and identify if two individuals are parent and child.

According to Prof. Ngowe Ngowe Marcelin, Dean of the Faculty of Health Science, they had 920 students last year. The faculty runs programmes in Medicine and Laboratory Sciences, all undergraduate. They also conduct post-graduate programmes in Master’s and Ph.D. The shortage of lecturers is the major problem, though this is not peculiar to the faculty. The medicine programme started in 2006 and so far four batches of 300 Medical Doctors have been graduated. “In other programmes like for nurses and laboratory technicians, we graduated the 16^th batch, an average of 40 per year. If you take the case of medical students, as soon as they graduate, they are at the disposal of the Ministry of Public Health. So far, they are all posted to State hospitals,” Prof. Ngowe explained.

For Bachelors degree in Nursing and Medical Laboratory Sciences, the graduates are absorbed by the State and others by private medical institutions. “We have just created an alumni association of Medical Doctors trained in UB to better monitor them. Some of them are coming back and some have gone abroad for specialization. We have contacts with them as they often send their files to us for certification,” Prof. Ngowe Ngowe Marcelin noted. The Faculty of Health Science has five departments - Biomedical Sciences, Obstetrics, Gynaecology and Surgery, Internal Medicine and Paediatric, Nursing and Medical Laboratory Sciences. Last year, it started PhD programmes in Public He...