What are the GPA and MCAT scores to be competitive at UWI schools? Are these schools even an option for students that want to do a residency in the U.S.? What can I expect if I attend there? Will it take me 5 years of school and a year off for the steps preppin' for USMLE on our own? Has anyone got a residency after graduating from these schools? Any non-Black students go there? Please post if you are attending there now. ---Hopefullpremed
1. My bad, I should have explained before. This is medicine British-style. Most of the students are coming straight from high-school. If you have a degree then they like first-class degrees meaning GPA's of 3.7 to 4. We don't do MCAT's here so I doubt anyone will care.
2. If you come here there's nothing stopping you from doing a US residency. People do it sometimes, although we have our own residencies. Plus, anyone who wants to do a fellowship has to go the US anyway because we only do the general IM residency.
3. Yes, it's 5 years to get your MBBS. All the work for the USMLE exams is on you and on your time. I have heard of people doing it during medical school but it's really hard to excel because our focus is different. For one, our medical school is designed to create GP's which means we have to rotate through almost everything. Hence, we have longer years than most schools (4th and 5th year are 50 weeks) and we have less elective time (10 weeks total). When we graduate, we have one year of internship then we can go open a practice.
4. People have gotten residencies, I think I even saw one who matched IM this year over on the IM forum. But like I said we have our own residencies so not a lot of people bother with the hassle of the US system.
5. Well, the school is mostly black (it is the Caribbean after all) but there are white Caribbean people here and I know of a few Europeans in the lower years but I think they're planning to naturalize. In general, most of the students here plan to stay in the Caribbean. This is not SGU.
Bottom line, if the plan is to stay in the US then there are easier ways. SGU and the other offshore schools are 4 years and you get US clinical experience (our rotations can only be done in UWI campus countries). Plus their syllabus follows the USMLE syllabus. You'd probably save yourself 2 years by going to SGU.
