Aaron Lemuel Ong
WITH barely three months to prepare, friends Martin Angelo Zanoria and Aaron Lemuel Ong chose to trust their four years of medicine training and resorted to self-review for the September 2018 Physicians Licensure Exam.
They plotted their own study schedules for each day and tried to follow it as much as they could.
“There were risks because we are also afraid of the ifs. What if we are not studying enough? What if we have not covered the right topics? But still we went on because we wanted to study at our own pace,” 26-year-old Ong told Cebu Daily News on Wednesday.
Ong said they kept on asking former schoolmates who were ahead of them in medical school for techniques in studying and on what topics they should focus on.
Yesterday, the hard work of the two Cebuano graduates paid off as both of them landed in the top 10 of the September 2018 Physicians Licensure Examination.
Zanoria, who graduated from the Cebu Institute of Medicine, landed second place with a score of 90.92 percent, next only to Kurl Jamora, who graduated from De La Salle Medical and Health Sciences Institute in Manila.
Ong, also a CIM graduate, secured the seventh spot with 89.92.
Ong said he was grateful to the institutions where he got his pre-medicine and medicine education.
Both Ong and Zanoria attended Velez College for their degree in Medical Technology. In 2013, Ong graduated Cum Laude while Zanoria finished Magna Cum Laude.
The friends then went to CIM for their degree in medicine, where they both graduated Cum Laude in June 2017.
“I was relieved when I saw the results and it was such an honor to be a product of CIM. Had it not been for their training, we would not be what we are now,” said Ong.
Now that he can write his name as Dr. Aaron Lemuel Ong, the young doctor said he will continue his residency at a private hospital in Cebu. His next goal is to become a specialist in internal medicine.
Zanoria, for his part, has traveled to the United States after the examination last September.
CIM also ranked first among top performing medical schools in the country, with a passing percentage of 99.33.
Only one of the 150 physicians licensure examination takers from CIM did not make it, the Professional Regulation Commission (PRC) announced on Wednesday.
University of Santo Tomas (UST) came in second place with a passing rate of 98.71 percent followed by the University of the Philippines, with 98.59 percent.
In their website, PRC also announced that 3,717 out of 4,542 examinees successfully passed the exams.
Disclaimer: The comments uploaded on this site do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of management and owner of Cebudailynews. We reserve the right to exclude comments that we deem to be inconsistent with our editorial standards.
