US student needs help with Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara

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caveman721

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Helllo to all, these are my stat's. If you can please give me some idea about UAG and the mca avg, as well as the program taught in english? Any information would be great. Thank you so much.

I'm from: NJ, USA
My country of citizenship is: USA
Currently studying: Biology

At this University:
AS: Associates in Science in biology (County College of Morris, NJ) BA: Bachelors of Arts in Biology (Rutgers, Newark NJ) Masters: Master of Biomedical Science {University of Medicine and Dentistry (UMDNJ), Newark, NJ}

My GPA is: AS:3.5 BA:3.675 Master's: 3.85 (this fall was the first semester haven't finished yet). Not sure what the total of the 3 is, not sure if they even put it all together, anyone has an answer to that?

My MCAT Scores were: I scored an 18M: 9BS 6PS 3VR (buzz kill!!) studying again now for them.

EC'S: 1) Volunteer EMT for the town's first aid squad for the past 5 years. 2) Work in Saint Barnabas Medical Center's ER as total bitch of the ER aka Clinical Tech, For the past 5 years. 3) Work as a paid EMT for monoc and do urban EMS in the cities of Orange, and Irvington for a the past year.

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Just to address a couple of points you made about UAG.

My best friend goes to UAG's "international program" and I get an earful from him frequently via emails and when he comes home for breaks. It's pretty hilarious the way he tells it, but I can't imagine actually living through it. He insists he loves living in Mexico but from what I hear about the school it's like a nightmare. Or a really bad comedy. Like the Nacho Libre of medical school.

UAG is an absolute disaster. The international program is fraudulent at best. They do not at all teach to the USMLE, that is completely wrong. The courses aren't really in English, it's mostly a spanglishly bastardized version (including exams!). Sometimes professors just don't even apologize and launch into 100 mile an hour spanish, even in the first semester. Normally you'd think well yeah, you're in Mexico - but he was told several times during the admission process that everything would be in English until the third year. What's the point of paying four times the price if it's still in spanish? He said a few times that he wished he'd just gotten into a straight spanish school. Or at least a better school.

There's an entire basic sciences course called community medicine or something where you have to spend hundreds of hours in a "hot, sweaty, empty, private hospital" according to my friend waiting for mythical patients to come in while being berated in spanish for not learning the material the right way.

Right before he was about to take the USMLE the school came out of nowhere and insisted that everybody had to take emergency medicine in order to prepare for the wards. Just out of the blue, on a Monday. So the next two weeks were full of labs that didn't have any equipment, in complete spanish, finishing with a written test that was incomprehensible in english or spanish. Then they insisted everyone had to do a 24 hour stay in an emergency room in a nearby puebla in the middle of nowhere in narco territory. My buddy said someone threw a grenade into the mayor's house that night and the doctor in charge told them to high tail it out of town and not mention anything to the school, because they would all fail the course and have to repeat the semester.

So the whole basic science portion is a complete joke. People say it gets better once you get into rotations, but they do not teach anything at all, the whole stolen exam thing vasca mentioned in the other thread is hilarious and true. They also apparently hit the international students up for random fees, a few thousand here, a few thousand there for absolutely no reason. I guess they just went over on the budget that month or something. In addition to that, they charge 3-4 times what they charge the mexican students. 22k vs 5k.

However you still hear from attendings in the states that UAG used to be an excellent school. I don't know what happened. I would definitely recommend only going to UAG as a last ditch, end of the road option. My friend said the year he graduated, only 10 people out of 180 were able to pass the USMLE and only 5 matched. You really can't argue with those kinds of numbers. There was a bunch of posts on valuemd about UAG but most of the juicy ones got deleted in some kind of mod war.

The thing that really stuck in my mind after talking to him was how he said all the really qualified students dropped out. Those with masters degrees, those who had a family, etc. They just immediately recognized it was a scam, saw through the smoke and mirrors and bailed in the first year.

It kind of sucks because it always sounds like going to school in Mexico would be awesome.
 
LOL i go to uag and i probably know your friend in the international program...as i am in 4th semester and just got permission to take step 1 after passing the kaplan midterm.
 
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LOL i go to uag and i probably know your friend in the international program...as i am in 4th semester and just got permission to take step 1 after passing the kaplan midterm.
Hi, are you currently a physician in the US? If so, I would like more information on how you made it out of UAG
 
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