distressedpremed

Hey guys, Just a quick question. As I'm entering 5th year of residency, I know the royal college exam is around 5K. Is there other items to budget for and what would be their estimates? I'm just trying to get a sense of how much I should save or moonlight for the final year. Thanks!

I feel like residency sometimes for surgical subspecialties is that they need people to take call for them. And quite honestly, apart from one or two people, I haven't really gotten much mentorship about the topic above. There are grads who haven't been able to find a job yet in our city for general jobs, let alone find OR time. I find that the subspecialties remaining are things that people don't really want to do/aren't profitable/take a long time per patient, so what happens is that sure you graduate and possibly find a job, and then what happens is that the staff just offload the patients onto you and focus on what's more lucrative instead.

For the scotiarewards, if you talk to them on the phone if there is a price mismatch they will try to match the price in my experience. However, usually they are pretty much the same price in my experience as buying from the airlines themselves. In terms of customer service - honestly all the banks are pretty terrible. I was originally with RBC and their customer service rep sucked throughout years of medical school. They refused to do -0.25% when other banks were starting to, and I just had to pack up the LOC and move to scotia. Now when I'm with scotia, there are just dumb things that happen as well that I get irritated with. My "rep" is just an ever changing cascade of people in that position, it all seems they're using that spot as a springboard for other things. The new reps are usually clueless about what the other banks are offering. Every year they ask me "is this my last year of residency" and I'm like dude, honestly I've sent your predecessors an email every single time bout when I'm done. I even send confirmation of enrollment myself and they still ask me! Honestly just compare the banks in terms of what they offer, which still seems to be scotia so far. Don't be afraid to ask questions or take your money anywhere else. It's not that hard to switch LOCs.

R, did you write the USMLEs for US licensing? I may be headed down that route in terms of horizon as well...at least for a few years before returning to canada.

+1 definitely. Residency just slowly ate the dream. Now it's just thinking about the escape plan...

Not to mention the politics behind the job hiring process, which @NLengr has already mentioned in previous posts. Myself, I really wanted to be in academics during med school but now in residency and hoping to get engaged in a year or two, it's difficult to keep delaying living your life. Most general jobs can you give you some semblance of work-life relationship depending on how you organize your practice. It's tough honestly. If you don't want to do general/comprehensive in your specialty, you probably have to go the academic route and deal with all the politics, hierarchy, etc. In the community, you can make substantially more and not have to deal with some of this, which seeing some of the infighting I see, is really nice to avoid...

doesn't matter since either way the monthly interest payments have to come from somewhere... When I was with RBC it was automatically charged, and even with scotiabank if you don't pay it off (i.e. don't have any income) it gets automatically charged either way the bank gets his due

The "principal" is the primary debt you're occuring. So you don't have to pay any of the money that you borrowed back, but you will accrue interest automatically. So if you borrowed $1000.00, you don't need to pay back any of that back during med school. However, you would need to accrue interest during that time on the 1K. That interest, given you probably don't have any cash or income, will simply accrue on top of that $1K. That is the "monthly interest payment" that you owe every month.

I just got my score back and I passed, and I'm in a subspecialty as far away from FM as possible. I just want to say that this exam is arbitrary, with no evidence clinically on why they decided to raise the passing score in 2018. I urge everyone to rethink this exam: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4830377/ If family medicine is a specialty, then what is the point of having a general practitioner exam?

80 K but worked part time, saved aggressively, sold some collector's items, lived at home during med school. CaRMS and electives cost me 10K FYI. Saving some money during residency as well.

I think the best advice I got from anyone before med school was from another resident at the time, which was that the point of med school wasn't necessarily to train you to become a physician (it used to be). The point of med school is to match. I didn't believe him that much initially in first year but now I would have to say I agree with him. You can't be a practicing physician or surgeon in canada without matching. Hence your energy in the next 3/4 years is to pass exams, do well in extracurriculars, and find out which residency you want and pursue it 100%.

agreed. I found MNP this year to be a bit less thorough then last year, and even when I asked some questions they didn't seem to keen in trying to answer. T2202A they don't seem very interested in looking for more deductions/tax savings. More interested in just submitting and getting it over with. It's good to use their services for convenience but when I'm staff I'm probably going to try to find someone as specialized as possible.

This seems pretty similar to what I have though (I'm with scotia)...with the exception of the $300,000 upper limit

We in Alberta still pay tuition - it's about $950 a year.

@ScotiabankMedsAdvisor