I know, personally I find it frustrating that UNCLE decides to call its degree BMed instead of MBBS (just because a lot of people don't understand there's no difference), but I do understand that it's the same thing. I guess it's just ignorance that leads people to think that the different name means anything important. Also, that Newcastle itself is a hole that hasn't really contributed much to Australian life apart from Silverchair and Jennifer Hawkins, doesn't really add much to the university's reputation
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TBH I'm a little emotionally involved. Newcastle has always been my first choice of med school (even though I went to high school in Melbourne) and although I think UNSW med is great I find it hard to believe that either med degree is superior to the other. I think UNSW is superior to Newc in a lot of degrees but at least in med I'd say the quality of the courses are roughly equal. I guess a lot of Sydney-siders would hear mostly about how great UNSW and USyd are but Newcastle's med course has an excellent reputation across Australia (especially in Melbourne where most med school discussion is dominated by talk of UMelb and Monash). Also, their style of teaching med, initially quite revolutionary, has been copied across the country in most med courses.
The more I talk to people from different med schools, the more I realise how great they all are in their own special ways. Medicine is such a different degree to most, because the degrees are quality controlled to make sure they're not dodgy (which doesn't happen in a lot of other degrees). At the end of the day though, if you've got your MBBS or BMed, you're going to be just as much a doctor as if you graduated from any other med school.