<p>I go to a magnet high school designed for people who want to go into medicine and we have this agreement with St. George's Med School that the top 15 (I am one of them) in our class has a guarantee at their medical school if we can maintain a 3.4GPA with a 3.25 science GPA in college. We also have to take the MCAT and score competitively for their medical school (Which is around a 25-26).</p>
<p>Now I don't really care about the name or prestige of a medical school as long as I'm a doctor in the end.</p>
<p>I was wondering though, are Caribbean med schools (St. George's is an American Med school but I don't know what it's classified as) worth it? Would it give me equal residency opportunities as other med schools?</p>
<p>Is this program a good thing to consider as a fall back if I don't get into UVAMed, MVC, EVMS, etc,...?</p>
<p>I am sure SGU, is giving money to the high school, so the high school would agree to this program. Otherwise, no high school would be stupid enough to do this, unless they had some incentive (under the table money maybe?) $$$$$?</p>
<p>I just had a meeting with my pre-med advisor at school and he summed things up very nicely.</p>
<p>Minimum College GPA/ MCAT Score (assuming you’re not a minority)</p>
<p>3.5+/30+…to be considered at many MD schools
3.2+/27+ OR 3.5+/24+…to be considered at any DO school
2.7+/20+… Caribbean med schools</p>
<p>I asked what the deal was with Caribbean schools and he was fairly blunt: they’re not great at preparing you for your boards in the US and you also tend to have trouble landing a residency position.</p>
<p>HOWEVER…if you have your heart set on being a doctor and failed to gain admission to either a DO or MD school after many attempts then a caribbean school is acceptable. He said you’ll just have to work a lot harder on your OWN to prepare yourself for the boards.</p>
<p>He even gave me the name of an alumni from from my college who went down to the Caribbean for med school. He’s now the number one or two (I forgot) vascular surgeon in the larger Pittsburgh area.</p>
<p>Bottom line: Don’t take an early admit from a med school in the carribean. They almost accept everyone so there’s plenty of time down the road to go there.</p>
<p>Sean, keep in mind that w/ the newer MD and DO schools opening, it will become increasingly difficult to impossible to obtain a US residency position from outside the US.</p>
<p>Im nowhere near competitive enough right now to apply to MD or DO schools, however I hope to change that.</p>
<p>My $0.02 is that it really depends on what you want to be. If you value name and prestige and want to go to Harvard, then obviously Carrib won’t suffice. If your ok with being a DO, then apply DO. However if you don’t care about your med school rank and want to be an MD and you can’t get into any US schools, then go Carrib, but only go as a last resort.</p>
<p>This is technically true. If you want to have a degree which is labeled an “MD,” then yes, the Caribbean will get the job done. If you actually want to work as a doctor, then it’s an extremely risky bet.</p>
<p>OP its no easy matter being a DO. At the hospitals ive worked at, ive heard nurses say something very innocent to patients such as “Im sorry, the doctor isn’t in right now, but the DO is.” to the chief of surgery telling his attending “Not to interview any DO’s” for openings on his surgical team. An orthopedic surgeon i met also told me when I asked him about DOs “We are all civil and have normal interaction when we meet each other, however at the back of my mind I am thinking that this person just couldn’t cut it to be an MD.”</p>
<p>This is just my experience, but yours could be completely different.</p>
<p>More importantly, it’s not as if being an MD from a Caribbean institution is any better. Surgeons aren’t stupid enough to be fooled just because the letters happen to line up. Does anybody really think that venture capitalists and investment bankers will be rude to CPAs but not University of Phoenix MBAs?</p>