Canadian graduated from a Canadian university. Did electrical engineering during undergrad. Did not try hard because became interested in Personal Training thus 2.8 GPA(serious regrets). Found my passion in medicine after working for 1 year. Took the MCAT after 3 month of study and got 508. Trying to do a data science grad school to pull my GPA up but found this forum and now I know that I need the prereqs to go to pretty much any US schools. Might need to drop the grad school. (Still have one year left.) Got 4.0 GPA at the grad school courses. I did not do any bio/organic chem prereqs during undergrad. I'll probably retake the MCAT at some point. So I'm thinking a few options:
- Continue doing grad school and hope that I can get into a Canadian med school although it's highly unlikely.
- This would take at least two years. And even with grad school done, I might not be able to apply due to GPA cutoff (took too many random courses during undergrad).
- Don't mind me saying the dirty word but going Caribbean and take my chances.
- I can enrol next year and no time wasted. But I could be left with 300k debt and no residency. I don't mind matching to US.
- One that really worry me is that STEP 1 is now P/F so I would not have ways to prove myself besides STEP 2.
- I kinda want to go this route so please give me that reality check
- Going to one of those SMP programs in the US and apply to DO schools. I'm Canadian without US green card so not sure my odds.
- Not sure if I can get in and even if I did, I see that most programs are with 60% success rates....
- It's going to need prereqs and I would need one year to do prereqs and one to two years to do the SMP. So another three years.
- This is going to put me into so much debt that I don't know if it's going to be worth it..... 400k USD I would say. No way I can get that much money from banks and student loan.
- Stop dreaming about medical school and just be an engineer for the rest of my life. This is the other part of the reality check...
Sorry for the long post. I thank you all in advance for your kind response. I'm 25 years old now BTW.
I have another question about physician salary: Usually how many years do people pay off their 300k student loans after becoming an attending? 3-4 years? 5-6 years? 10 years? In FM or IM.
I am not Canadian, so I cannot speak directly to some aspects of this post. But I can offer some general pointers about US medical school admissions. Hopefully someone more familiar with Canadian MD can jump in about making your application more competitive for those schools.
My initial thought is that if you got a 508 MCAT with only three months of study and many missing prerequisites, you have the capacity to get a very competitive MCAT score for US medical schools on your retake. With that in mind, here is the reality check you asked for:
Going Caribbean at this point is selling yourself extremely short. You should want better for your life and career than what a Caribbean school can offer. They are predatory, for-profit institutions whose entire business models hinge on failing out large swaths of their students (well over 50% in some cases). They literally do not have the resources to graduate the amount of students they accept. This behavior would amount to educational malpractice in the US.
If you are unlucky enough to get forced out of your Caribbean medical school, how do you expect to pay off six figures of debt without a physician income? If you manage to make it through to your clinical years, you will find that the clinical training experience is inferior to what you will get from a US/Canadian MD or US DO school. Finally, many graduates from the Caribbean fail to match at all, leaving them with a worthless MD degree that depreciates in value with each successive year on top of several hundred thousand dollars of debt.
Going to the Caribbean is the equivalent of playing roulette and putting at least $250,000 USD on black. If you win, you get the prize of being an FM or IM physician with little control over your geographic location. If you lose, your life is marred by debt that will haunt you forever.
The bottom line is that you should expect and demand better for yourself than an inferior Caribbean medical education.
So let's forget about Caribbean for now and focus on what you can do to be competitive for Canadian or US schools. First off, you need to start thinking about why you want to be a doctor (maybe you already have, but it's not apparent from your post how you landed on medicine and how informed that decision is.) Also, what do your ECs look like? I can't speak to Canadian MD, but US MD/DO medical schools require extensive extracurricular involvement. Mandatory activities include clinical experience (paid or volunteer), nonclinical community service, and physician shadowing. Leadership and research activities are also highly valued. Where do you stand there?
