I had been accepted in 4 Carib schools in total but I'm trying to decide between this two. I want to see opinions of current students in terms of:
1. How many started first semester and how many finished?
2. How lectures are given? AUA have me all confuse will the new 10 students classes and all the technology. I'm old school over 35 y/o student so I'm not a big fan of sitting to listening 4 hours long videos.
3. How easy are rotations assignments given. Waiting time and stuff like that.
4. Research: I know SABA have a research module in where you can even get to publish I haven't heard or find anything from AUA.
5. Quality of life at the island. How easy is to do your groceries and things like that. I have friends at st Kitts that have their groceries shipped over and that sound a little complicated to me.
Any insight is good.
I lived on Saba and it is a hard island to live on. Food is essentially twice what you would pay in North America (in contrast an island like St Maarten, for example, would be 50% more than NA but much less than Saba). Saba also does not grow anything fresh, so all meat is frozen and there are only a few vegetables that come in on Wednesdays every week but are gone from the stores by Thursdays.
Moreover, we all know that med schools have a bit of a "cut-throat culture", they are for-profit businesses after all, but Saba is at another level. Some, but not all, expats go down to the Caribbean to specifically run illegal businesses, and some faculty at these schools can't help but make a buck on the side through some of these schemes, for example corrupt housing schemes and other dodgy practices. And because Saba doesn't have a court system on the island, it is impossible to stop or even curtail. There is a heavy amount of extortion going on at SUSOM on Saba whereby the students have to make illegal payments to landlords and if they don't they are kicked out of the program. I can back this up as I was there and this practice is known about by a large number of students. If you are unlucky enough to fall victim to it, all your loans you took out to get you that far will have to be paid back with no degree to show for it, not because you couldn't do the work, but you couldn't make the extortion payments. Bottom line is you aren't in Kansas any more Dorothy. Some of these campuses are cesspools of corruption, and Saba is one of the worst.
Having said that, there is nothing i can say about the rest of the faculty, as the corrupt faculty is permanent but the rest of the teaching faculty turns over every few months. If they aren't part of the game, they don't last long. Which means good faculty do not stay on Saba. As a result, don't let anyone tell you how the teaching is; two months from now it will be completely different teachers in many of the subjects.
Last thing I can say about Saba is that it is a risk. Rumour is that they need ten times the fall student numbers than showed up for the current semester 1 intake if they are to survive. That is, they need 80 students to start in the fall and last I heard they had an enrolment of 8 in the spring. No one can sell a car on Saba because so many hundreds of students have left the island because of what the upper administration is doing, that the population of the island has dropped by 20% as students flee. These are the realities about what is going on on Saba.
That's just my objective observation. I don't know much about AUA.
