Reflections on International Medical Schools

A lot of the information in this post is based off of forums (SDN, Premed101), friends and Google..and a minor bit from personal experience.  As you've probably gleaned from my previous posts, I was a arts/science kid in undergrad.  So I had a lot of contact with overeager premed and prelaw students.  Unsurprisingly, some of it rubbed off.

One of the biggest questions that usually crops out on the premed forums - for those thinking of applying outside North America for medical school - is "Caribbean vs. Australia vs Ireland vs UK vs Europe vs Asia vs. Etc".  Regardless of where you ultimately decide to go to, you'll be labelled an IMG if you decide to head back to North America - but that's probably best left as the subject of another blog post.  It's no secret that studying where you want to eventually practice is the best plan, but sometimes things don't work out the way you want them to.  That's life.    

Everyone has their reasons for applying outside of Canada/USA. Some want to avoid the MCAT, some because the NA schools can be rather unforgiving about their GPA requirements, some because they didn't get in despite having the stats, etc.

I'm not here to make judgements on that.  Rather, what I want to provide is a 'Pros and Cons List' of what I think these locations encompass.  Remember, these are my opinions - feel free to disagree but please don't get nasty about it. Parts of this post has previously appeared on SDN but since I wrote that post as well...