Two VUB students have claimed top prize at the first international edition of MedCup, held in Brussels on 21 and 22 October. Andreas Borremans and Christophe Sonck proved to be the strongest of more than 200 medical students who took part in the competition, from some 40 Belgian and foreign universities.
Borremans and Sonck won two out of nine practical challenges in which they had the chance to demonstrate their knowledge and skills of ophthalmology and intubation in front of a jury of experts. However, excelling in the competition was not the intention, admits Sonck: “We registered because we just wanted to have two fun days, learn something and meet people.
But things turned out differently. Their performance in the challenges earned the students a ticket to the finals where they faced a series of theoretical questions and complex clinical cases. And here too they proved to be the best. They were too strong for their final competitors from France and became the happy winners of MedCup 2022.
Borremans: “Our strength is the combination of our different interests that overlap and our education at VUB. This is very practical and because of the great freedom of choice and variety of internships, we have already seen and been able to do a lot.”
Sonck: “I am happy to have been able to show what we can already do such as placing a peripheral catheter without assistance. This is also why I chose VUB: for the practice, the internship experience and reasoning about the cases you encounter there.”
Their victory earns the pair a travel voucher worth €1,000. A second team from VUB also won prizes at MedCup: Laure Ledegen and Marit Iliaans finished first in the discipline of medical imaging.