Tanatswa graduated with the IB Diploma in May 2021 and will be starting his studies for medicine in September 2022. For his studies he was awarded the International Peace Bursary from St. George’s University - School of Medicine. Congratulations, Tantaswa. WIS is proud to have been part of your journey.
Tanatswa kindly shared his journey with us. We wish him well in his future endeavours and I hope he stays in touch to let us be part of his journey in the future.
“School has always been a challenge for me. Firstly I went through Afrikaans schools, facing a language barrier, bullying, and mediocre grades. In 2011, I then transferred to Windhoek International School where I faced a new kind of challenge. My new classmates were far ahead of me, as I was not so creative (I remember failing to invent a gadget for one Unit of Inquiry), my writing and reading was quite slow, and my mathematics was not so great. Despite this, I rose to this challenge. By my second year at WIS, I was in the advanced mathematics group, in the highest reading group, and I felt more aligned with the IB Learner Profile attributes. At some point the idea of “challenge” was redefined for me at WIS.
I became a challenge-seeker. Throughout my high school years, I was actively seeking challenging activities to gain the skills and attributes needed as a doctor.
These included leading the senior student council as co-president, joining a play production as one of the main roles and two Model United Nations conferences (despite my difficulty in public speaking).
Furthermore, my friends and I competed and won the NUST 2019 Brain match in STEM subjects. During the IB Diploma Programme, I tried doing as many CAS experiences as possible. I even completed two CAS projects. For the first project, Jimmy and I helped in the provision of dental health education to underprivileged children in Namibia.
Secondly, I took an active leadership role in organising the 2020 Christopher Aiff Memorial Cup. Schooling at WIS prepared me and gave me my leadership skills. At present I feel leadership is the value that best describes me, as it encompasses my creativity, curiosity, and drive to collaborate with and help others. I believe that the more curious and creative we allow ourselves to become, the more we gain perspective, wisdom, and a love for learning.
Since the beginning of IGCSE, I knew I wanted to become a medical professional. I remember when deciding on a career, I had listed about 100 careers I was remotely interested in. This list was then 20 science related careers, before becoming a trio of careers in medicine. My admiration for health workers rose during my IGCSE Work Experience at Howard Hospital, a rural hospital in Zimbabwe. There I spent a week shadowing various healthcare professionals, including doctors, dentists, a radiologist and a nurse anaesthetist. Despite being in rural Chiweshe, I observed that it was very well run as I got to see the interworking of the hospital.
In Zimbabwe, there is a critical doctor shortage with only about 3500 registered doctors for a country of 15 million people. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates a deficiency of 4.3 million health professionals globally, especially in rural and remote areas. Hence this leads to lower quality health care, long wait times for consultations with time constraints, and increased workload for medical practitioners. I wish to help people because I am saddened to see so many people suffering. Through my studies, I hope to gain an international perspective on how best to contribute to establishing a good health infrastructure in my country. Starting with building a single hospital, I aspire to expand that into a network of hospitals and clinics throughout Africa. Right now I have accepted an offer to St. George’s University in Grenada (West Indies) as I firmly believe that studying there will assist me in achieving my goal. Especially considering that I will start at the partner university in Newcastle, UK before moving to the Grenada campus. The offer also included a partial scholarship of $40 000 which ultimately made the decision easier. During the university application process I applied to about 14 universities and researched many more all over the world. Being open to apply anywhere was quite overwhelming and towards the end, it also became tiring. The approach I took was to just give myself as many options as I could, which meant finding applications with no fee. But after applying through BridgeU, UCAS, Common App, agents, hard-copies and direct applications to universities, it was the final application that became my university of choice. I had 6 offers from universities, with 3 being in medicine. These were at Western Sydney University, Otago University which would start its first year online, and then St. George’s University.
I am happy with the outcome, even if it was not on my radar from the start. I expect to start in mid-September, thus in the meantime I will be keeping myself busy in Namibia.”