5/15: It's final. I'm heading to Washington U. in St. Louis. I like the school and the way students are treated down there. The full-tuition scholarship is also quite irresistable.
As you can probably gather from my application summary above, the only thing one can say about this process is APPLY TO YOUR DREAM SCHOOLS. The schools I thought I had a reasonable chance at showed me the door, whereas the schools on which I thought I threw away a couple of hundred of dollars showed me love and lots of it.
Expense breakdown (in CAD):
MCAT - August 2004: $210 USD (~$250 CAD)
Application fee (bracketed number refers to the number of schools)
1. AMCAS (4): $250 USD (~$300 CAD)
2. OMSAS (1): $275
3. American school secondaries fees (4): $300 USD (~$360 CAD)
4. Non-Ontario Canadian school application fees (3): $275
5. Transcripts & Postage: $65
TOTAL: $1275
Interview expense
1. Interview suit and boots: $600
2. WashU St. Louis: $500 (flight), $10 (expense) [WashU offered a free night's stay at Olin Residence and free meals. Also light-rail from airport to the school was very convenient and took only half an hour each way, all for $7.75 USD round-trip.]
3. Duke & Harvard: $650 (flight), $40 (expense) [I crashed with family friends and the nicest, coolest student hosts ever.]
4. McGill & Toronto: $775 (flight), $100 (expense) [I was a moron to book a flight between McGill and Toronto: train would have been so much cheaper and just as time efficient given the terrible traffic jam to the Trudeau Airport. There were shuttles to and from the airports, costing about $30 both ways.]
5. UAlberta: $250 (same-day flight), $25 (expense) [Go Sky Shuttle go!]
TOTAL: $2950
GRAND TOTAL: $4500 CAD
ACCEPTANCE INTO MEDICAL SCHOOL: PRICELESS
Impression of each school I've interviewed at:
UBC
With a projected entry class size of 256, this will be the largest class in North America. Whether the postgraduate programs in BC have the capacity to absorb this cohort awaits to be determined. Pre-clinical curriculum was divided evenly between PBL and lectures (6hr/week of each). A strength of the UBC program was its heavy emphasis on community involvement and service: throughout the preclinical years, students followed through with a family clinic assigned to them; rural medicine and family practice was also the first of the core clerkships. And there were so many eyecandies in the class and among the applicants, as UBC lived up to its reputation for being the school with the nicest visual effects, yumyumyum=)
U of Alberta
The university hospital was designed by the same architect that designed Eaton Centre--in other words, it was a hospital that did not look like a hospital: hot. The school atmosphere was upbeat and optimistic, not that all the oil money didn't have something to do with it. The core rotations, complete with on-calls and plenty of opportunity for hands-on procedures, certainly came through as a strong selling point. I also heard much about the good anatomy program. An additional plus about this school was its emerging status as a research powerhouse: start-of-art diabetic and coronary care were among its hallmarks; medical research for medicine undergrads was among the finest in the country. Although Edmonton was not a very exciting city to live in, the cheap tuition more than made up for it.
U of Toronto
All that I loved about this school were what I loved about HMS: 10+ teaching hospitals and a gazillion research affiliates, very strong international health and community outreach programs, supportive administration and ample funding, worldclass research opportunities, and a motivated and diverse student body. No place had as great a clinical exposure as McGill though. UToronto fell (slightly) inferior to HMS only in degree but certainly not in kind...and after all, tuition was under half that of HMS.
McGill
A school that felt like an Ivy... for a quarter of the Ivy tuition. The school and the city were beautiful. It had the best curriculum I've seen to date: 1.5 year pre-clinical with minimal clinical exposure, 0.5 year shadowing, and 2 years hardcore clinical, so you learn things once, twice, and thrice in different settings. The clerkships were amazing: Quebec doctors and residents were insanely busy, so they treated their medical students like residents, i.e. you got to do EVERYTHING.
The student body was less impressive than the school, perhaps due to the fact that half of McGill students did not have a bachelor's degree. We were advised to learn some basic French, as many elderly patients in the McGill Hospital only spoke French.
Finally, some statistics for OOP: 550 applicants, 48 interviews, 7 spots. Ouch, ouch, ouch!
Harvard
Amazing. My 20th birthday wish: a stuffed crimson envelope. (A stretch, really. The interviewees there were all so qualified that I felt honoured just to have been invited.)
They got financial aid for international students too!!!
(I know the above isn't all that descriptive or informative, but f*** it, just go there and see for yourself. While you are at it, don't forget to check out MGH.)
Duke
The Durham-Raleigh-Chapel Hill area was essentially a Silicon Valley of the South: 3 universities (Duke, UNC, NC State U) and plenty of high-tech companies (e.g. IBM, GSK) in the Research Triangle Park. Otherwise it was a heavily wooded, serene and very friendly neighbourhood in which you cannot live without cars. The cost of living was a huge plus: imagine sharing a newly furnished, 2-bedroom townhouse with your own bathrooms for $350 a month! The school and hospitals were as impressive as WashU, and the students were just so nice and so easy to bond with. The curriculum had its share of problems (i.e. not enough basic sciences, a less-than-ideal introduction to patient relationships, and clinical rotations where students did not seem to be as involved), but the overall idea of one research year sandwiched between two clinical years was still very sexy.
The overall feeling I got was that Duke was more elitist than WashU. The 1st- and 2nd-year students were genuinely nice and laidback, but the staff, faculty and upper-level students seemed to have more of an air of entitlement. Another thing I did NOT like was Duke's poor financial options for international students: a $260,000 USD deposit prior to matriculation; even the merit-based scholarships (3 half-rides) were not open to non-Americans. Also, only 60-70% of third-year students got research funding...of only $20,000-$30,000: a drop in the bucket of debt one would have accumulated.
WashU St. Louis
The area was a huge complex of the medical school, hospitals (including Barnes-Jewish and the Children's Hospital which blew me away), clinics, and research centres--unlimited possibilities indeed. Although the pre-clinical years were fairly conventional, with its large lectures and smaller group tutorials, I was informed that the clinical years were very well-organized and offered students plenty of autonomous, decision-making opportunities.
The faculty and administration were incredibly friendly and accomodating, as were the students. I would really love to study under some of the professors. The school was filthy rich, with virtually unlimited funding for student research, 20 merit-based full-ride scholarships extending to international students as well, and brand-new facilities. The area looked friendly enough and cost of living was very reasonable: I was told that one could rent an one-bedroom apartment or share a two-bedroom apartment at Central West End, the nice neighbourhood right beside the school, for $600 or $500 a month !
However, like Duke they require from non-Americans a bank proof that all 4 years of tuition and living expenses (~$260,000 USD) be placed in a trust fund. Now if you read in the newspaper in the next few months about a seemingly harmless Asian girl who attempted to rob a bank in Vancouver, that's probably me...
