I finally finished pre-U and am now waiting for my UPU results which will come out in August. I did Matrikulasi KPM (surprise!); my CGPA is 3.79 and I got MUET Band 5.
I had set my mind on doing a Biomedical Sciences / Biomedicine degree since after SPM. And my targeted universities are UM, UPM, UKM, USM (in descending order).
Sadly, I don’t qualify for UM’s Biomedical Sciences degree because I didn’t get a B for SPM Chemistry (=_=; ). But I qualify for UM’s Biohealth Sciences degree and UPM’s Biomedical Sciences degree.
Now here’s the thing; Biomedical and Biohealth are similar yet different courses. Biomedical is under the Medicine faculty while Biohealth is under the Science faculty. Hence, the syllabus will be slightly different. Biomedical focuses more on human health while Biohealth will focus on animal physiology too. I hate learning about plants and animals lol and would prefer learning only about humans.
But UM is my dream university. It’s probably the best place where I can be comfortable because of the community and the location in the city. They do teach Biomedical at UPM in English but I might have trouble fitting in and end up being stressed from the environment.
Should I just try to target UM and work my way through the course which I may not enjoy but may be capable of doing? Or should I focus on UPM because it has the course I want but I’ll have to suffer the brunt of the place? I didn’t quite enjoy my time at Matrik either, just so you know.
I don’t even know if this site is still active but I’ll take my shot-
Hi @happycat, you will soon realize there is no right or wrong answer here and you will surely get different answers when you ask enough different people.
Having said that, if I am in your situation, I will definitely place course over university. In other words, while some universities are more popular than others, at the end of the day it depends on what you really want to study and the relevant career that you want to pursue after graduation. If I originally wanted to study biomedical sciences, I will definitely not change to other course just because of university, especially you already know that you are going to suffer learning biohealth sciences.
Hi! It’s been a while since I made this post but basically:
Here’s what I put for my UPU application:
Biohealth UM, Biomedical Science UPM, Microbiology UPM, Microbiology UM, Cell and Molecular Biology UPM, Genetics UM, Biomedicine USM, Biotechnology UM, Community Health and Food Science UPM, English Language and Linguistics UM, (I forgot the others)
And here’s what I received:
Microbiology UPM (maybe I should’ve put Microbiology UM first…)
So no, UPM did not accept me to do biomedicine but they accepted me to do microbiology.
Keep in mind that this was in 2020, so your options and chances (?) of getting a certain choice may differ.
But I didn’t take up UPM’s offer, I went somewhere else that’s a lot better
