Welcome to SDN, pennytop!!
I believe it would be very difficult to live abroad and apply to medical schools. Maybe it depends on what kind of applicant you are. If you have terrific stats and a terrific application in all other regards, only plan to apply to a few schools, and can afford to travel back to the US several times (often on short notice) for interviews, then maybe it would work out. But if you're an average kind of applicant and end up applying to 20+ schools just to make sure you get in somewhere (and since you don't know exactly what your stats will be, you'll want to cover a lot of bases in the schools you apply to), and end up getting quite a few interviews -- well, you see the problem. Getting an interview does not equal getting in, so you pretty much have to go to all interviews until you get an acceptance, and by then, you're going to have strong hopes and desires about which school you'd prefer to get that acceptance from. Anyway, you see the problem......... Basically time and money. I'm in Alaska, which for the purposes of airfares is probably something like being overseas. I spent close to $8000 on the whole application process this year.
Also, I spent a lot of time and money Express and/or Priority Mailing things last year (I applied to 23 schools, got 14 interviews). I don't know what the mail's like where you are, but many schools communicate with applicants through the mail, and there's a lot of stuff you have to send to them (a few are totally on-line -- but even they sometimes then ask you to send them a picture or a signature form). Last year AMCAS so totally screwed up that applicants basically had to print out and mail their applications to many schools they were applying to because AMCAS couldn't get its electronic transmission bugs ironed out in time. Maybe it'll be better this year, but based on the way they performed last year, I wouldn't count on it. Oh yeah, then there's time (and more money) spent on the phone, trying to straighten things out with AMCAS, or find out application status from individual schools.
Sorry to be so negative, but I really think you'd be better off to stick to your original plan. Best of luck, whatever you decide to do!!
Where are you, anyway?
