A Kenyan doctor has opened up about the silent struggle that follows medical school, revealing that holding a degree and a licence is no guarantee of landing a job.
Ann Wambui, a graduate of the University of Nairobi, took to social media to share her experience of unemployment, which has persisted for two years since she completed both her degree and her internship.
Wambui’s Countdown That Led Nowhere
Wambui described how she had clung to the idea that surviving internship was the final hurdle. She kept a calendar during that period, marking off each rotation as it passed, convinced she was working her way towards something more stable.
“Can we talk about something no one prepared me for about becoming a doctor. I spent the last years of internship counting down and I even had a calendar marking out rotations hoping to get through the hardest part, get my licence and registration and begin life,” she said.
That vision did not match the reality that followed. Once she received her licence, Wambui found herself sending out application after application, collecting rejections and confronting a job market that seemed indifferent to her qualifications.
Wambui was particularly candid about a belief she said many people hold but that her experience has firmly contradicted: that doctors are immune to unemployment.
“That is not true, you get your licence then start applying for jobs, you face rejection, no one wants to hire you, you have no experience and no one talks about how confusing this period is. Internship was a struggle but life afterwards is a whole different kind of struggle,” she stated.
Her words resonate with a broader reality in Kenya’s public health sector, where the number of medical graduates has grown steadily while government hiring has not always kept pace.
For a young doctor who invested years in training, the gap between qualification and employment can feel both unexpected and demoralising.
Wambui’s honesty about her situation has drawn attention to a conversation that rarely surfaces publicly, one about the emotional and financial weight carried by newly qualified doctors who find themselves in a difficult waiting period that nobody warned them about.
