Cap in number of Electives

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1 hour ago, hopeful_med said:

There is no profession in the world where everyone gets to have their ideal job

While that's true, there are also very few, if any jobs, where the "ideal" can be as far from what people end up with if they scramble for a residency spot. Someone whose ideal is cardiac surgery or neurosurgery for example is probably going to have a very hard time adjusting to a lifetime of family medicine - very little overlap between some of the specialties in medicine. This is also in the context of hardly ever being able to switch if you end up in a specialty that you don't want to be in unless you abandon medicine altogether, the opportunity cost of at least 3-4 additional years of schooling compared to non-medicine colleagues, the debt from said schooling, etc.

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On 2/3/2019 at 4:22 PM, dk3what said:

As a M4 who just finished the CaRMS tour, I would dare to say that some programs are VERY disconnected from what is going on at the UGME level. They have no idea how electives are obtained (i.e. that we have to apply through the portal, spending hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars per block). They have no idea that different schools have different elective times/schedules, they unfortunately assume that every school follows something similar to their home school. Obviously I'm not familiar with most programs, so this may not apply everywhere. 

Programs are already have trouble keeping up with the +++ number of applications they are receiving due to most applicants backing up or "parallel planning". This change makes it much easier to apply to multiple specialties and I 100% agree with Aetherus in that I believe this will only make things worse for competitive specialties where now any person can try their luck and shoot an application to these programs, as opposed to doing some due diligence and showing commitment via X number of electives.

See my response above. In my opinion, it will hurt applicants first choice specialty IF its a competitive one. Maybe I'm biased, because I am applying to a relative competitive specialty but I already find that programs struggle to figure out who to invite for interviews, and increasing the number of applicants to these small competitive programs will not help things.

Do you really want to force applicants to jump through even more hoops like publications, site visits, unofficial electives, etc to demonstrate interest? Most PDs will agree that its very hard to determine how interested an applicant is in a particular specialty and its unfortunate they use elective time a substitute measure. They realize its possible to have many different interests, but unfortunately they have to be pragmatic to cut down and sort through applications and elective time is one such way to do so. I'm not arguing that this is right or wrong, but simply trying to convey that this is the way it is, and I personally would rather commit to 1/2 specialties rather than find new and expensive ways to demonstrate my interest in a specialty. 

 Don't we have enough stress? Don't we already spend a considerably amount of money on the entire elective and CaRMS process?

Congrats on finishing the tour! It is a stressful time and med school is unbelievably stressful. Personally, I find residency, despite the greater number of hours, to be less stressful than the pre-CaRMS year. 

With that being said, I'm not sure I fully agree. Electives shouldn't be most of the means by which a program can judge an applicant, which as you rightly mentioned, seems to often be the case. Should it be fair that a UBC medical school student interested in a competitive specialty has 24 weeks of electives while a Calgary student has 10? That means the UBC medical school student has more opportunities to impress and as such, a stronger application just by virtue of attending UBC. Like you mentioned, programs don't know this. As far as we can tell, they are going to be more likely to offer interviews to (as well as rank highly) people who've done electives and UBC applicants will have been more likely to have done so. 

I also think electives are not always the best way to evaluate a potential candidate. They are best used along with other parameters. Some of the weaknesses of electives are that they require a short burst of performance, longer than an interview, but less than more longitudinal efforts like research, conferences, awards, ECs etc. 

I also don't think publications and shadowing are necessarily bad things. Especially publications, since the skills learned from research often carry over into residency and staff careers.

On the other side of things, this really forces certain students to think about other career options. In the current climate, many students have fears of doing electives in other specialties for fear of looking not committed to their primary specialty. This policy goes a long way to helping alleviate those fears.

I think the AFMC and the medical schools were really looking at making this more fair across all schools in Canada and I think they have done well.