Covid experience as intern made me strong, resilient: NEET PG 2022 topper Dr Shagun Batra

New Delhi: One should not lose hope even if results are not to their expectation as it is the effort that is important, says Dr Shagun Batra, a Delhiite who has topped the NEET-PG 2022. The NEET-PG 2022 results were declared on Wednesday. Batra, an alumni of the DPS RK Puram, has been a topper in her school all throughout, as well as during the MBBS exams.

Sharing the recipe for her success in the NEET-PG exam, Batra said that she started her preparations during the third year of the MBBS, juggling coaching and college while finding time to study on her own. She said it was for the first time that she had appeared for a postgraduate competitive exam.

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"I didn't know I would become the NEET topper. I just prepared for it and gave my best shot without expecting much," Dr Batra said. The only doctor in her family, she said she chose to become a medical practitioner to be able to make a difference in someone's life.

Her experience as a frontline worker during the Covid crisis made her realise the crucial importance of doctors in driving away pain and illness. Due to COVID-19, Dr Batra said the final year medical students missed out on hands-on training and hardly interacted with patients.

She said the second wave of Covid was at its peak when she began her internship and found herself along with her fellow batchmates in the midst of a raging crisis posed by the pandemic. "My first day on duty was in Covid ICU. We had 15 days of duty and 15 days of quarantine. I stayed in the college hostel that time and could meet my parents only once in a month or two, even though my house was just an hour away from the hostel.

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"Amid panic and a frightening environment most of us didn't know how to deal with the situation while keeping ourselves safe," the topper recalled. However, she said it was a great learning period which had made her "strong and resilient". After topping the class 12 exam at Delhi Public School, RK Puram here, she took admission at Maulana Azad Medical College in 2016 and had taken the top rank in her MBBS batch.

Her father is an IT professional and mother, a homemaker. The National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) Post Graduate-2022 was held on May 21 at 849 centres. A total of 1,82,318 candidates had taken the exam.