Costs: Tuition this year was 25,000.00 euro, so about $39,000.000 Canadian after the exchange rate (I wish the Canadian dollar would go back up to where it was in the fall -we were briefly kicking ass, but now we have a really wimpy dollar again and it sucks!). Living expenses are highly variable, but if you live in residence in Cork it is about 5000.00 euro for the school year, and then you need about 300 euro/month for other stuff (it depends if you have any fixed expenses like asthma meds - they will drive the monthly amount up a bit, but if you are healthy and just need food and beer and the occasional movie you should be able to do that on 200-400 per month). Then you might also have to factor in interest on loans (if you are Canadian and do a line of credit from a bank you pay interest on it from the minute you draw on it to the minute it is payed off). Amounts for Dublin would be higher, especially for rent.
People do get back to Canada - if you check out the "Where are we" thread and the Match threads, you can see where we tend to go. This year from UCC so far we have one obs and gyne at UofT and a rural medicine at MUN, and a paeds somewhere in the US. It is difficult to get back in becuase there are only a limited number of spots for us in Canada, but lots of people do residency in the US and then come home after. Canada is opening up a bit though, so who knows what things will be like by the time you graduate. We aren't training enough doctors and there is a limit to how many we can poach from India and Pakistan and Nigeria and South Africa so something somewhere has to give!
As for GPA cut-offs and MCAT scores, no one really knows the answer to that question. The numbers tend to be quite competitive (3.8's and 33's) but you also get oddballs like me with my 3.56 GPA and 28R MCAT -respectable but not stellar. The Irish schools do look at life experience, but I think they look at things differently every year. Like all med school applications, it is a crap shoot. Some people get rejected by Trinity and snapped up by UCC, some UCC rejects get into Trinity. The class above me is convinced that all the Canadians who applied that year from "the arse end of the alphabet" (i.e. p and later) got sent to UCC, since no one in their class has a last name with a first letter from the beginning of the alphabet. It's kind of random
Anyway, hope that has cleared up the muddification a bit for you. Cheers,
M
