Seeking Med school advice

[Jeremydyer]

I'm a high school student and very determined that I want to enter Medical school. I am faced with a dilemma however: should I go to med school in Europe or Canada? If I go to med school in Canada (where I am from) then I will spend 4 years doing my undergrad, 4 years in med school and then 6 years doing my residency. If, however, I go to med school in Europe, I will spend 6 years in pre med / med and 2 years doing my residency. Thats almost half the time it would take to do it in Canada. My question here though is if it would look better to go to school in Europe or if it would look worse making it hard to become employed. It seems to me that it would look worse because it seems like your getting a "way to quick, sloppy" education or maybe it looks great because you have received a very advanced education. Also, would it be difficult to come back to Canada or the US to practice after receiving my education in Europe (the school I'm looking at is Odessa state medical school in the Ukraine). Thanks a lot for any help or advice given

[KKerr]

Bottom line - if you are certain that at some point, you want to practice in the U.S. or Canada - you should train there!! This is for a couple of reasons (and am basing most of this on working in the U.S. - so apologies if things are slightly different for canada) - 1) In order to practice in the U.S. - you MUST do a residency there, and in order to do a residency you must pass the USMLE (United States Medical Licensing Exams). It is possible to take the first part of the USMLE outside the US, but you have to travel back to take part 2 (part 3 taken during residency) - therefore you are not "cutting out" that much time (6 years in Med school + 2/3 residency vs. 8 years undergrad+medschool, 2/3 years residency). 2) The USMLE's are more difficutl to pass if you study outside of the US (not impossible - but difficult), the U.S. med school curriculum is designed to prepare you for the USMLE, European programs are not - therefore you will have to do a fair bit of studying outside your normal studies in order to prepare yourself for them. 3) not all European educations are viewed the same in the U.S. and Canada, and foreign graduates (even if you are resident of that county) normally do not have access to the best or most competitive residency programs - so you may be limiting your choices of what kind of medicine you can practice in the long term - do you really want to take that risk for the sake of a few years? 4) European med school educations can be VERY expensive for foreigners, and the loan system in the U.S. does not extend to all foreign med. programs, you need to think of how you will finance it. 5) There can be severe language barriers in studying abroad, for example, there is a very good uni in Prague that some people on here have considered, and part of the requirements for passing the pre-clinical to move onto clinical is becoming fluent in the language, which is a difficult language to learn especially combined with your studies; and finally, I guess this is 6) Why be in a rush?? You are young - if you really want to be a doctor, choose the best path academically, NOT the quickest - you will have many, many years ahead of you to practice medicine and you need to set yourself to do this in a speciality you enjoy, in a country/environment you enjoy with a good, solid education. Enjoy the process - dont try to short cut it!!

Hope this is helpful.

[Miss M.]

Europe has higher standards than Canada, particularly the UK, go for it there.

[KKerr]

Europe has higher standards than Canada, particularly the UK, go for it there.

Really? Do you realise that all the new UK medical schools are revising their programs based on a Canadian method of teaching that they have been using for the past decade?
Unless you have studied in both - difficult statement to back up!

You still have the same problems of trying to practice in the UK/Canada regardless of the "standards" in the UK.

[Miss M.]

Canada is hardly on the news every night for its med schools fab discoveries.

Emma.

[KKerr]

McMaster University (in Canada) INVENTED PBL. And no, that isnt in the news everynight - but it is now in every UK medical schools curriculum - about 10 years later than they started using it in Canada. Dont confuse good research with good undergraduate teaching, sometimes the two could not be further apart.

I am not saying that Candadian medical schools are superior to the UK, but neither is the reverse true.

[Miss M.]

PBL is not that successful. The traditional unis (who tend to produced better docs) have only incorporated a tiny amount of PBL.
Btw I doubt they "invented" PBL, which is in effect self directed learning.

[Spencer Wells]

Firstly, McMaster did "invent" PBL. They're the medical school who first reported using it, and it has spread widely (even Harvard med use it).
Canada produces competent doctors, and while you might not necessarily hear of them in the mass media, their schools are all highly respected in the academic community.
Secondly, there is no objective measure of standards of UK med school graduates. Therefore it is impossible to say that traditional unis produce better doctors - there is simply no evidence to support this.
And, to the original poster, a UK "residency" (i.e. the time taken from graduating from med school to the highest post, the consultant (roughly equivalent to the North American attending)) is 11 years, not 2.

[Mark____]

PBL is not that successful. The traditional unis (who tend to produced better docs) have only incorporated a tiny amount of PBL.
Btw I doubt they "invented" PBL, which is in effect self directed learning.

Oi, less of the PBL slaggin' ho.

I must agree though, that Canada is hardly the frontier of the medical future.
The UK invented Canada so we'll always win.

[KKerr]

I would be interested to see where you get your information, i.e. that PBL is not successful and that "traditional" schools tend to produce better docs. I have offers from Edinburgh, Kings and Nottingham, all 3 with excellent reputations for producing very good "docs" and all 3 incorporate a certain (not tiny) amount of PBL. And how come something that is "self-directed" cannot be "invented", and PBL is not simply self-directed learning - its defination of "problem-based learning" means that information is placed in context around a central problem rather than learned purely through route memorization. And although there are some concerns with courses that have gone to purley PBL, the GMC recommendations are now that EVERY University in the UK should place information in context and reduce the amount of factual information that must be memorised by students. You really need to back up your arguments with evidence.

http://65.39.131.180/ContentPage.asp...am_What_is_PBL

From the above article:

"Abstract: Since the introduction of a problem-based learning (PBL) curriculum at the McMaster University School of Medicine in 1969, many medical schools in different regions of the world have adopted this approach, usually with some variations to suit their local needs."

"it was the innnovation of the problem-based approach developed by McMaster University in the late 1960's that blazed the train of student-centred, interdisciplinary teaching and learning ..."

"Subsequent VARIATIONS (my own emphasis) of the "McMaster Model" have been adopted by a number of schools in the U.S. including... Harvard...."

"The educators from McMaster University have played a fascilitative role in the early planning process of new curricula in some of thes universities such as Harvard and the University of Hawaii"

You can read the article for yourself if you have any other questions.