Visiting KEMU

Today we had the privilege of meeting the acting dean, the provost, and other important faculties of KEMU, a Methodist Church University. They were one of 64 universities in Kenya. They also give a tour of their university, which had beautiful tropical plants of a diverse colors and there was even a tree that looked like an overgrown pineapple. The campus even had a lake in the middle of campus with nicely paved gravel pathways and buildings that had three or four floors. Their classrooms and laboratories had many windows that looked out to a beautiful scenic view of plants and the lake. We told them it was rare to find large windows like theirs in UM. They laugh back asking us how we get ventilation. 

We did not get a chance to visit the undergrad buildings, so it was mainly the grad buildings where masters and phd would study. Even though KEMU had about 10,000+ students enrolled, there were not many graduate students in classrooms, classrooms that could hold up to 30+ students. The main issue was not the  lack of qualified students but the lack of lecturers. In order to teach master, you need to hold a degree above the level you teach. All the master grads can teach undergrad but not enough phd or higher are available to teach master and/or phd students. It is one of two challenges KEMU faces. However teachers w/ Masters and have experience, could teach phd classes. it is a gray area. Kenyans value education above all and even stresses that all students to go for a phd. The second one is the infrastructure limitation. They want to enroll as many students as possible into universities but their lecture halls can not hold such capacity. 

There is so much I'm learning that I am behind in blogging. This blog was a lot of facts. However, I felt after listening to this, I feel more and more motivated to promote this Kenyan trip to my fellow pharmacy classmates. I feel that young professions like us would benefit from seeing a different world from US and getting shocked by how much bias we carry into the country. I'll type my next blog on research questions. I had pharmacy questions that are IRB approved and I felt ready to ask the ques. However a SPH faculty that was with us crushed my questions that now I have to think it through. More on this on next post as I have to leave shortly.