Nobody Told Me Getting Into Medical School Meant I Had to Learn French

I am a 100-level student at the University of Ibadan, and I did not study French in secondary school. Not one lesson or even a class. So here I am… searching for YouTube videos, looking up study guides and trying to figure out the differences between masculine and feminine articles, memorising figures, letters and verbs I have never seen before in my life. Not because I want to, but because we’ll soon start exams and I need an A. I need that A not because French will ever help me save a life, but because the system demands it and I refuse to let a language I never asked to learn drag down my GPA.

That is where I am. That is what 100-level looks like from where I am standing.

I knew the path ahead when I chose medicine. I know I’ll spend years of relentless reading, memorizing anatomy diagrams at midnight and striving hard to pass my incourses and MB exams. I signed up for all of that. What I did not sign up for was learning French verbs at 11 pm on Duolingo, or attending compulsory lectures on topics so far removed from my faculty that I genuinely have to remind myself why I am here. Let me not start with French, let me start somewhere more painful.

There are students on this campus—and in universities across Nigeria—who wrote the UTME three times before they got in. Four times. Five times. Students who spent years rewriting, re-sitting, re-applying, holding on to a dream that kept slipping just out of reach. They finally got their admission. They finally got the letter. They told their families. They cried. And now they are here, sitting in a 100-level lecture hall, being told that before they can touch anything resembling their actual programme, they must first survive a year of courses that have nothing to do with Medicine.

Do we now say those students are not fit enough for Preclinicals? That those three to five attempts at UTME, years of sacrifice, relentless determination—none of that counts until they have passed COS 101 and GES 108? What exactly are we measuring here? What exactly is 100-level proving? Because I know it certainly is not proving who will make a good doctor and who is resilient enough to survive medical school.

Let us also be honest about something that people in the system already know but rarely say: 100-level is not a reliable filter for medical school. The student who tops every GES course may struggle the moment Anatomy begins. The student who barely scraped through 100-level could well walk into Preclinicals and morph into one of the most brilliant folks. The skills tested in 100-level, and the skills demanded by medical training are wholly dissimilar. So the idea that this year serves as some kind of academic gatekeeping mechanism is misguided.

An average student during 100-level might end up better than most of the so-called best students once Preclinicals begin. That is not speculation. That is something students and lecturers alike have watched happen. Yet we have built an entire year around a system that does not actually predict the outcome it claims to select for.

Now, let us talk about what we are actually doing in that year.

Yes, AI is changing the world. Everyone knows this. It is in every conversation, every headline, and it was even the main speech delivered during our orientation. But sitting through COS 101 as a three-unit course is not going to make me understand how artificial intelligence is evolving. It is not going to make me a better doctor, a more informed researcher, or even a more tech-literate person in any meaningful way. It is going to make me memorise enough to pass an exam and forget it before the semester ends. If the goal is genuine digital literacy, then a single 100-level course taught to students who are not even focused on it is not the answer. And it does not stop at French. MTH 101 and 102 are sitting right there in the timetable as well. At a point, I would genuinely start to wonder, did I gain admission to study Medicine or Engineering? Because the curriculum is not making that distinction very clear. Mathematics at that level, treated as a core requirement for medical students, is not building clinicians. It is building exam survivors.

And the GES 108 (French) I am studying right now? I will not be speaking French when attending to patients. I will not be using those verbs in the middle of a ward round. Although I have no problem with General Courses in English because I believe communication is genuinely important in medicine, I do want someone to look me in the eyes and explain to me with a straight face, why French is compulsory for a student who came here to study Medicine in Nigeria.

This frustration is not laziness. It is not an unwillingness to learn; it is the very clear, very loud reality that time and energy are finite and that every hour spent on a course that will never matter is an hour stolen from one that will.

Here is the bigger picture that nobody wants to acknowledge: Nigeria is already spending too many years on education that does not move students forward.

Six years in secondary school. Six years. That is a significant portion of a young person’s life, and what does the SSCE syllabus actually build? There are people who never attended secondary school, yet sat down with the syllabuses during tutorials or by watching YouTube videos, covered it in far less time, and walked into critical exams knowing more than their mates who spent six full years in a classroom. Why? because they were not bogged down by a system that stretches learning over more time than the learning requires. They created space for more meaningful things.

And then after six years of secondary school, we add another year of 100-level which is effectively a continuation of the same pattern: broad, unfocused and disconnected from the career you are training for. Throw in five (plus x) more years of medical school after that, and the mathematics of it all begins to seem exhausting. Not because medical training should be rushed, but because so much of the time spent before it even begins is not actually preparing anyone for anything.

Six years to study Medicine is enough, not as a matter of cutting corners, but as a matter of respecting what those six years can genuinely achieve if the curriculum starts where it should. It is not about rushing medical training; it is about asking why Preclinicals cannot begin in 100-level. If Anatomy, Biochemistry and Physiology were introduced from 100-level, the workload across the programme would be more evenly distributed. Right now, those three subjects are compressed into three semesters, and the weight of that compression is something Nigerian medical students carry in ways that go far beyond academic stress.

We have normalised suffering so much in Nigerian universities that we barely flinch when students talk about breaking down, burning out, losing themselves somewhere between first and second year. The mental health crisis among medical students in this country is real, and a significant part of it traces back to a curriculum that piles an inhumane amount of content into too little time. Anatomy alone could break a person. Biochemistry alone could break a person. Physiology alone could break a person. Now take all three, compress them, and hand them to students who spent their entire 100 level doing French and Mathematics, students who had no gradual entry point, no soft landing into the world they were about to be thrown into.

And we have been told for so long that surviving it is the point, that we have started to believe it.

And then there is the issue that makes my blood pressure rise every time I think about it. Universities, particularly UNILAG, LASU and others, admit more students into medicine than they intend to take into Preclinicals. They admit more than the required quota, put students through 100-level, and then cut a significant number off. Some are transferred to other departments entirely, and some simply lose their place. 

Think about what that means for a second. A student who wrote UTME multiple times, who scored at least 300, had a very good WAEC result, passed the Post-UTME and finally got admitted, told his parents, his neighbours, and his secondary school teachers that he got in, he is studying Medicine and Surgery, and now has to sit through an entire year not knowing if any of it is real. Not knowing if the admission they celebrated is actually going to lead to where they were told it would. The psychological weight of that alone is something nobody talks about enough.

Why would an institution admit more students than it plans to keep? Why would you invite someone to a seat at the table, watch them show up, sit down, order their meal and then tell them halfway through that the table was never really theirs? What is the ethical justification for that? What does it say about how these institutions view the students who trust them?

And the bitter irony is that 100-level, the very year being used to make this cut, is not even a reliable measure of who will survive medical school. We have already established that. So students are being screened out using a filter that does not actually work, after being admitted under false pretences, after spending a year of their lives and their families’ money on a process that was never fully honest with them.

I want to be clear. I am not saying university should be easy. I am not saying medical students should skip the hard parts. The hard parts are coming, I know that, and I know they are part of the process. What I am saying is that the system around 100-level, as it currently exists, is not serving students. It is not building better doctors. It is not filtering for the right qualities. It is not providing meaningful education. In many cases, it is simply burning time, the time that belongs to students who have already given up years to get here.

We came here to learn medicine. We came here to become doctors, to one day stand in front of patients who will trust us with their lives. That is not something to be taken lightly, and students who choose this path are not taking it lightly.

And yet, here is the part that frustrates me most of all. After everything I have said, after every word of this piece, I am still going to open that French textbook again. Duolingo is still going to disturb me to keep the streak going—it’s not its fault, it’s the situation I’ve found myself in. I am still going to find a way to get that A, because I did not come this far to let a compulsory language course be what holds me back. The system is what it is, and until it changes, I will work within it. I will do what I have to do.

But I will not pretend that I am not angry. I will not smile through a curriculum that wastes my time and calls it education. I will not act like everything is fine when students around me are quietly falling apart under the weight of a system that never asked if we were okay. I am going to get my A by God’s grace, and I am going to remain annoyed about the fact that I had to.

Romlah Abdulazeez