See, there are three parts in this question.
- How much do you have to study.
Obviously, in this section, Neet pg wins. Neet pg has a total of 19 subjects to study, with giants like Surgery, Gynecology, PSM, Pharmacology etc along with the king of medical science, Internal medicine. The syllabus is never ending, and even if you complete the whole syllabus, you can’t remember all of them, no matter how much you study.
In the other hand, neet ug has 3 subjects, Physics, Chemistry and biology ( zoology and botany). Although, I scored the highest in physics and least in botany, many of the aspirants frequently complain about the physics section. Maybe, physics question is tougher now, but yeah, you can finish the syllabus within 8 months of good slogging. When I see my old ncert now, I just think that once, I considered this book as vast. 🤣
In neet pg however, if you try to read each and every subject, you won’t be able to finish even 2/3rd within 8 months. So start preparing for neet pg as early as possible.
2) Competition
This one goes to UG. I guess there were a total of 18 lakhs aspirants this time, right? And how many seats? 40k?(talking about generals). So around 2.2% is the selection rate. Means just 2 people among 100 are going to get selected.
If you compare this with PG. If I include all the seats (clinical, non clinical, paraclinical), the last rank to get a seat last time was around at 1 lakh ( MD physiology). And this year, total number of doctors sitting for pg was 1.7 lakhs. So that’s about 59%. We may not get our dream branch, but if you want ti settle for any postgraduate degree, it is easy for us.
3) Societal pressure and career.
Us, sitting for neet pg, are already doctors. We can sit in a clinic with just a prescription pad, a stethoscope and a sphygmomanometer and can easily earn good money now. Society does look at us like doctors. We are respected in the society, in the hospital. And even if we don’t Crack pg, we can still get over 2L/ month if we just give some extra hours. Now a days, Mbbs passout jobs are rampant. I made a naukri dot Com profile 6 months ago, and I still get mails from them for Jobs, daily.
Sadly, this is not true for ug. Bitter truth is, if you fail, people are going to blindside all the labour that you put during your preparation and just gonna mark you a loser. That feeling is haunting. I have seen happening to one of my friend, and he unwillingly had to take a BAMS course because his parents wanted to see him as a doctor, no matter what the degree might be . He dropped one year later, and took up Bachelor of arts in history and currently preparing for upsc.
So, to conclude, I think neet ug is tougher, and I’ll never let myself to go through the same phase again. I have not taken any drop, but the feeling is haunting, that you take a drop and still don’t clear it, so you take a drop again, and again. Personally, if I didn’t get mbbs the first time, I would have left it. Salute to all those who keep slogging over to fight for their dreams again and again.