Monday, 8 March 2010
The first podiatrists in Australia to be trained in a Faculty of Medicine will graduate from UWA this month.
The University began training podiatrists in 2006 and the first 17 to complete a Bachelor of Podiatric Medicine will receive their degrees in Winthrop Hall on the final night (March 25) of a nine-night graduation season. Pictured at right is newly-graduated podiatrist, Jonathan Ho.
Professor Alan Bryant, the Head of Podiatric Medicine, said the graduands had done about 40 per cent of their studies in parallel with student doctors, studying the same subjects. "We are very proud to be graduating the first podiatrists with this degree of medical training," he said.
When UWA's new course structure is implemented, Podiatric Medicine will become a postgraduate degree and graduates will be Doctors of Podiatric Medicine.
Professor Bryant said all 17 graduands had been quickly employed except for one who is doing Honours this year. There are already 15 postgraduate students in the course, studying for Masters and Doctorates.
The podiatrists graduate on the same night as the University's biggest ever cohort of medical graduates. "They were known as the Bulge," said Dean of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, Professor Ian Puddey.
The increase came about when Notre Dame University applied to teach a medical course and the Federal Government funded extra places for medical students. But Notre Dame was not ready to start its course, so UWA applied to ‘mind' the places.
Then UWA's first intake of graduate medical students (who also graduate at the same ceremony) joined the already big class and produced what everybody in the Faculty knows now as ‘the Bulge'.
A total of 199 new doctors will join the podiatrists on the stage of Winthrop Hall.
The 39 dentists who are graduating this year will have their degrees conferred at an earlier ceremony, on March 15.
The nine ceremonies will see 3,045 degrees conferred, including 73 PhDs and 10 professional doctorates, one in Medicine and nine in Education.
For many years, the Bachelor of Commerce has been the most popular degree and this season, the graduands receiving that degree have a ceremony specially for them on March 11: all 426 of them.
The Bachelor of Science is one of the most diverse degrees at UWA. Just from within the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences, 161 Bachelors degrees will be awarded in areas of study including conservation biology,
viticulture, urban and regional planning, natural resource management, mineral geoscience, marine science, genetics and breeding, horticulture and green chemistry.
Tags
- Channels
- Teaching and Learning