At Regents International School Pattaya your child will leave our school with everything they need for success, whatever they choose to be or do in life. Our students are accepted by the world’s top universities, and we love to hear about their successes once they have left us, to hopefully inspire other students to strive for greatness and reach for the stars, because nothing is impossible.
Recently, we had a wonderful opportunity to talk with Iulia Arnswald, a class-of-2020 alumni, when she came for a visit to share her experiences with our Sixth Form students.
“I joined Regents around the age of 7 in Year 2 - so I was at regents for a total of 10 years. I graduated in 2020 during the peak of COVID and went on to study Medical Science at the University of Edinburgh in the UK. I was able to join a ‘direct entry’ program, which granted me 120 credits from my International Baccalaureate Diploma, allowing me to skip a full year of university!
It does not go without saying that this is a hard course, especially at the University of Edinburgh. Every day I learn something new, and what I particularly like about my degree is that I am at the very forefront of knowledge. With each of my professors conducting their own research, the knowledge I am exposed to is yet to be printed in textbooks, in a sense that, often times questions are asked that are yet to elicited; medicine truly is a forever changing learning environment - it is one of the many things I really love about my degree.
Throughout my degree I was able to experience various fields of medicine; last summer I worked at a lab testing samples from hosp. vitals for various microbes. This summer I worked in an orthopedic surgery ward in Spain! I worked closely with surgeons, treating patients that had hip fractures all the way to elbow reconstructive surgery. This experience has guided my career choices that I plan to take; I will be pursuing an orthopaedic/ traumatologist career path in surgery.
My experience at Regents has been and always has been helpful to me. One thing I do want to stress here is that I would not have had the fortunate opportunity of these internships without my education and experiences that I had at Regents. Throughout the interview processes for both these jobs I drew on experiences during outdoor education, round square week, and various other trips (such as climbing Kilimanjaro), to thoroughly convey who I am as a person, and how I learnt so much about myself in these situations. I demonstrated my empathy, determination, and willingness to take risks through these anecdotes - I attribute my successful application process wholeheartedly to Regents.
Because Regents is such an international school, I had absolutely no problem settling in and meeting new people from all over the globe! I was able to really communicate with people that I might not share the same background and upbringing with - because friendship transcends that, I learnt that early on from just being a student at Regents. My closest friends in Edinburgh, are from Slovenia, Malaysia, India, Egypt, and Germany - they’re the loveliest group of people and they really help to make Edinburgh home for me. We have done everything together from going on a road trip into the highlands, to attending balls in beautiful dresses, and running marathons!
Not only did Regents prepare me academically - allowing me to skip a year because of my performance in high school, but also, I learnt so many soft skills that I was able to transfer into my undergraduate student life.
Teachers at Regents, especially in the IB, teach students about citations, formatting, using the correct diction and syntax, and have so many useful resources - that I use pretty much every day. Be it whilst I’m writing essays, talking to professors, conducting lab research, or even reading academic literature - I use the soft skills Regents taught me all the time.
To all the current students at Regents. I would like to advise you to really take on any opportunity you are given - be it a Co-Curricular Activity where you are volunteering in an orphanage or taking on pillar leadership roles. Though it might not seem like it, the opportunities, and experiences that Regents provides you with (inside and outside of the classroom) are invaluable in your future academic career.
For my future plans, I am going to graduate with my bachelors this upcoming May, and then I plan on pursuing my postgraduate MD in Italy - which means I’ll be studying for another 5 years.
I’m super excited to start the MD, and I cannot wait to get back into the OR (operating room). Though this is still a dream, I plan on pursuing orthopaedics/ trauma - with which one day I will hopefully be able to use at my dream job of working with Medicins Sans Frontier! (I have been doing some volunteering working the MSF as well, and I’m slowly but surely getting my name out there).”
