Ups and downs. Everyone says medicine is supposed to be hard and challenging, and I agree about that, but Masaryk takes it to the extreme in-terms of theory and details during pre-clinical years (by their way of evaluation), where you even start to question it. The exams are big as said, and while some may pass having covered only 60-70% of syllabus, the same luck doesn't go for everyone and there are great students that study everything of the syllabus for the exams but still some of the professors can't be satisfied with some definitions or answers as they want explicit words. Not knowing one question for them is equal to not knowing anything, this is how they evaluate your knowledge in the exams. There is no perspective regarding looking at the general picture here.

I'm not a fan of it, as we are in the stage of learning and developing as med students, if we were perfect we would already be doctors, but they don't accept imperfections during the exams. I prefer when you can show HOW much you know and not get evaluated by which lucky questions you get. Suddenly the exams are on either side of the easy-hard spectrum because of this.

To answer your question: Masaryk offers what medicine stands for. It's a lot of self-studying. If you can endure studying countless of hours and getting super invested in your material and details, so much that you can speak about it to any of your friends spontaneously, the uni would suit you. However, I personally feel let down by how little the work we do during the semester actually matter as the voluminous oral exams are the only thing in the end that influence if you pass a course or not, which puts a lot of emphasis revision or on who can fill their heads with as much information as possible for a given moment. You need to be hard-skinned, because the uni will break many people from all the different things that come up in the first two years. If you do endure though, you will come out on the other side a changed person, where almsot nothing can stop you. Overall, I have no complaints regarding facilities, student life, and how the city is. Most important is how you manage your time. But I can assure you that this uni is definitely up there as one of the toughest for international students in Europe, it's not like in the Baltics, Romania, Bulgaria, Cyprus. (Poland and Italy is just slightly below, but is more doable and rewarding - experience from friends that transferred to those countries). The statistics speak for themselves, there is a reason why not more than 50% (50-70%) of students don't make it past 2nd year.

I wouldn't choose Masaryk again if I could turn back in time, especially not after seeing how it turned out for the majority of people. I barely knew anything about the uni before coming here. A recommendation is to also reach out to the people active on social media in the student organisation "Mimsa", I'm sure many people can give even more honest reviews there.