Dear Editor,

There is a conversation that rarely happens in public about what it actually costs — emotionally, physically, and financially — to be a high-performing student in The University of the West Indies (UWI) Mona’s professional faculties. I, therefore, want to have that conversation.

Medical students at this university, in my opinion, endure a training regime that would challenge anyone. Unpaid clinical rotations, extended hospital hours, and the psychological weight of patient care during formative academic years produce a level of pressure that the university’s existing welfare infrastructure was not designed to absorb. Burnout among medical students is not anecdotal — it is documented, widespread, and largely unaddressed at the institutional level. There is no structured mental health access line specifically for this cohort. There are no meal voucher arrangements for students on rotation who cannot easily leave a ward to find food. There is no transportation support for the late-night journeys home after a full clinical shift. These are not extraordinary asks. They are baseline necessities.

Engineering students face a different, but equally serious, problem. The faculty produces graduates with strong theoretical foundations and, in many cases, genuinely innovative project work. But the pathway from a promising final-year project to a real-world prototype or enterprise is almost entirely blocked by the absence of seed funding, industry mentorship, and structured exposure to investors. Projects that could solve real Jamaican infrastructure problems sit in folders, unbuilt, because no mechanism exists to carry them beyond the classroom. The university trains the engineers. It does not yet invest in what they build.

In the Faculty of Science and Technology, the pattern repeats. High-quality student research — work that in other jurisdictions would attract patent applications, commercialisation interest, or, at minimum, publication — routinely goes unrecognised and unfunded. Students graduate without knowing that their research had commercial or policy value.

Jamaica loses intellectual capital it spent years developing simply because the bridge between academic work and real-world application has never been built. None of this requires the invention of entirely new institutions. What it requires is the will to connect existing resources — corporate partners, industry mentors, investment networks, and mental health providers — to the students who need them, in a structured and sustained way. The Guild of Students, operating through its constitutional seat on faculty committees, is well-positioned to drive exactly this kind of intervention.

Jamaica is losing too many talented graduates to migration, underemployment, and burnout. Some of that loss begins long before graduation, in the faculties where we train our future doctors, engineers, and scientists. It is past time to treat student welfare in professional faculties as a strategic national priority — not an afterthought.

Shaquille Ramsay

Student

The University of the West Indies, Mona

shaquilleramsay@gmail.com