Dubai: Graduating from medical school with flying colours is never an easy task, but experiencing it with your beau makes a gruelling experience that much better.
When you join hands with the one you love and plod along through endless hours of studying and exhaustive hospital rotation placements, graduation is simply the cherry on top.
This may sound like something from a fairy tale, but in fact is the story of Gulf Medical University (GMU) graduates Veelshad Reezuana and Taimoor Mirza. The pair got engaged a day before graduating with 63 of their peers at GMU's sixth graduation ceremony last week.
Not only is the 12-year-old institution the backdrop to this romantic tale, it also boasts of four students who qualified for Step One of the US Medical Licensing Exams (USMLE) in the top 90 percentile, two of whom are lovebirds, Reezuana and Mirza.
The USMLE allows medical graduates to practice in the United States and assesses medical students' applications of fundamental scientific concepts to the practice of medicine.
Above board
"Medical graduates usually take a year to write the US board exams and it can be a pretty stressful period," said 25-year-old Mirza, who was awarded a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS).
"We decided to finish it all before graduation," he added.
Of the six years at medical school, Mirza said the final year was the hardest. He said after 12-hour days on internship at various hospitals, the pair would then study for six hours solid in preparation for the exams.
"We survived off three to four hours of sleep a night for a whole year," he said.
On top of medical school fees, the pair's parents forked out $5,000 (Dh18,250) to take the board exams.
"We did all the preparation at home," Mirza said. "There are lots of review courses in the UAE but we couldn't afford it," he added.
"We started studying together [at] the beginning of second year," said 26-year-old Reezuana, who was also awarded an MBBS.
The Mauritanian national admitted she was practically a recluse during her first year.
"I found it hard to adjust living alone in a foreign country with a huge workload, so I just studied and didn't socialise," she added.
The pair met during their second year of medical school and became study partners, but their friendship quickly blossomed into something deeper.
"Our grades improved a lot when we started quizzing each other," she said.
"I didn't expect all this to happen but it marks a major milestone in my life," said Reezuana about the dual celebration.
Set to be the first doctor in her family, she said medicine was something she had always wanted to pursue.
"I always wanted to become a doctor because I like fixing things and wanted to do the same for people," she said.
"Back home when someone has kidney or liver disease they are basically handed a death sentence."
Amidst her joy, Reezuana lamented her father, who died last summer, saying: "I wish he was here to see all this because he was my biggest fan."
