When I was there (2004-2007) and N. Americans would go back to do clinical terms, they almost universally agreed that while they weren't as strong as the American students on the basic science (particularly pharmacology), they knew far more clinical medicine and were more at ease in the clinical environment.
I heard similar things from senior students when I was in 1st/2nd year, but when I actually got to 4th year and did my rotations, I didn't really get that impression. I think this is a statement that's perpetuated by the top-class students who go to the US and, because they're the success stories, they're the ones who end up sharing their wisdom with future generations. When I talked to my classmates who went to the US, most of them didn't feel like they knew "far more" clinical medicine. If anything, our clinical thought process might be a bit more streamlined, since that's something that we really learned in Australia and they really don't learn in the US.
But in general, I've found a general trend that whenever people aren't very good at basic or clinical sciences, they have a tendency to say "oh, we're really good clinically." It's like the people who aren't very smart, but they say "hey, I have street smarts." Not saying that it's not always true - but I always find it funny when somebody says something like "oh, our residency program doesn't focus as much on research as the bigger-name program across town, but their fellowships prefer to hire our residents because we focus on
clinical skills. I mean, they usually take their own graduates, but that's just because they're biased. They took one of ours three years ago, so it's clear that they wanted somebody with good
clinical skills instead of their usual eggheads."
I would also note that the N. American students have done as well as the Australians in the course itself. There aren't more failures, and last I knew (granted, this goes back a few years, but with very similar acceptance stats back then) their grades were not significantly different from the locals'. This could be in part because of differences in the applicant groups (there are so many new schools here, and very few if any prerequisites which in the US is a big self-selector) that I would suspect that the average GAMSAT score is not equivalent to the average MCAT score, in so far as they can be compared -- and they are very different exams testing different things); and in part because generally speaking, the int'ls who come here tend to work their butts off, since they are paying many times the tuition, and have more pressure to do well knowing they may have to return to N. America (vs. the disincentive of an almost exclusively non-merit based internship selection for Australians who have the fallback of staying here).
I agree with most of those comments in principle, but I've noticed a somewhat different trend. The top students in my class were all Aussies, since we had some of the brightest and hardest-working students in Australia. The brightest and hardest-working students in N.America usually end up staying in N.America, so even the top N.American students in our class were in the 70-80th percentile compared to the Aussies.
Also, we had a handful of international students who did more than their fair share of slacking. I've never seen stats on how many people fail, but I had to repeat an exam once, and there was definitely a disproportionate number of international students in that room.
Still, I think that the median N.American student was probably about the same as the median Aussie student.
pre med 2014 said:
Who told you that? The Internet?
The medians stats of admitted applicants is significantly higher than the minimum requirements.
Yeah, but the median will obviously be higher than the minimum. I remember people on this forum reporting that they got in with a 26, IIRC. But as pitman said, it's a rolling process... so you'd have to be lucky to get in with a 26 (based on the rest of the pool), and you'd have to be unlucky to get rejected with a 30.
The bottom line is that UQ has been accredited in Australia for a long time, and it's a proper legitimate medical school. If you apply for residency in the US, it'll probably be seen in a better light than the Caribbean just because it's in Australia, but most people will never have heard of it. If you have good American rec letters and USMLE scores, that's proof enough that your education was appropriate.
My experience on the interview trail was that if people have heard of your school and/or know some researchers from there, that's a big advantage. As a result, I think having a degree from USyd really helped me, and the same is probably true for U.Melbourne. At my interview at Mayo, the head of the department specifically wanted to meet with me because he's friends with the head of the department at my hospital in Sydney, and has a lot of research ties in Australia. At Indiana, one of my interviewers was a Melbourne graduate, and we spent half the time talking about Australia. At WashU (where I ended up matching), the associate program director was really excited about learning about Australia, and we spent a lot of time talking about that. In general, everybody thought that it was an interesting topic to discuss, as long as you have interesting things to say about it... and you have to present yourself as a generally interesting and well-accomplished person so that they see your Aussie experience as a period of enrichment rather than being concerned that you were away from the American system.
