I'll try to answer everyone's questions. I'm a U.S. MD, and I went to a good private school, or at least an expensive one. I'm a nontrad student who went back to college for a year of the prereq classes. They went well, but throughout the first two years of med school I barely passed everything. The material all made sense, but I couldn't memorize it fast enough. I think all my life I've been bad at straight memorization, but I was always easily able to compensate for it until med school started. I failed Step I by a point and got a 201 on the retake. That probably would have been all right except that when I took surgery I passed each part of the rotation, including the shelf exam, but the grade was averaged out in such a way that I failed the rotation. I thought that was ridiculous, and the surgeon I worked with the most was absolutely livid that my school would do this, especially because he knew I really was working hard and helping the team out a lot, but what could I do? I retook the surgery rotation at a different site, didn't do anything different and this time I passed with no problems. Between taking extra time for Step I and getting failed in surgery, I was left with no time in third year for electives, away rotations or a sub-i before interview season. I knew that would never work, so I delayed graduating by a year. I got a 228 on Step 2. A big improvement, but still not all that great.
Oddly enough, I did great on my anesthesiology rotations. I liked the work, and the residents loved that I set up their rooms for them each morning and generally tried to be as helpful as I could throughout the day. I had some excellent away rotations and got plenty of LORs. Of course, none of that mattered when interview season came around. With all those red flags on my application I ended up with three interviews, two of which were from places I'd worked at and may have been courtesy interviews. I didn't match and didn't even get a phone call in SOAP. I can't say I was surprised to go unmatched. Programs had their choice of plenty of Caribbean students with better Step scores than me to choose from.
It is true that I could try to do a prelim year, FM or IM, but I'm not confident in my odds of success. I applied to quite a few medicine and surgery prelim years and never got an interview from them. I don't much like IM and I seriously doubt I'd be any good at it. I had a good FM rotation and might be able to match into that, but I just can't get myself excited about the possibility of doing well patient exams and treating the flu for the next twenty years. FM residency followed by anesthesiology residency, for a total of 6-7 years? No thanks. Medical school has been nothing but failure, disappointment and heartache. I didn't get to celebrate Match Day with my class, I didn't get to celebrate Match Day when I should have matched, I've got a useless diploma and in a few weeks I won't be celebrating graduation. I've had enough. I can be happier making slightly less money doing something else.
