robclem21

Usually when you do enough research with someone for them to know that you are interested in their specialty, they will go out of their way to get you into clinical scenarios so they can write you a letter. If they don't go out of their way, then usually they are receptive to the suggestion if you bring it up. Don't underestimate the important of having good people in your corner go to bat for you when the time comes. (sorry for the mixed boxing/baseball metaphor).

2 different letters. Each letter should address your skills, experience, and suitability for the specific specialty you are applying for. Both letters can include common elements about your soft qualities (work ethic, interpersonal relationships, problem solving, etc.), but programs will need to see that current staff in that field feel you are a good fit.

This is assuming that applicants interview at their top 3 spots. I know many amazing people who did not get an interview at one or more of their top 3 locations. If you only apply to 3 with the hope of staying in a certain city, and don't get 1 or 2 interviews, then all of sudden your statistics don't look so hot (95+% down to <80%). There is no guarantee of interviews, particularly in competitive programs in big cities (including family medicine) and especially if your applicant is spread across multiple specialties and some look like a back-up.

Stats are an outcome of the collective application strategies. If everybody in the country were to only apply to and rank 3 programs, who knows what those statistics would look like. Maybe you would see a huge spike in the number of unmatched applicants and the amount matching to their top 3 would be vastly different. Especially if those 3 programs were all from unique fields. Speaking to many PDs across Canada in a large number of specialties, the main factor leading to medical students going unmatched is not applying broadly enough. This is based on post-hoc conversations with applicants who

While I don't think this standardized LOR is a good idea by any means, and some of the ideas presented in this form as you have posted it are a bit ridiculous (as others have mentioned), I fail to see how it is discriminatory... Maybe it is just me, but nowhere on this form do the ideas of sex, race, family status or disability even remotely appear. There is also nothing here about dealing with harassment in medical education.

It's pretty much the same process. There are usually some more formal programs offered depending on the school, but just email people who you want to work with. Major difference is they may give your email 30 seconds more consideration if you are a medical student.

While it is great that this worked out for you, I do not think on a broad scale that applying to only 3 programs in a limited geographical area is a reasonable strategy unless (as others have mentioned) applicants are prepared to go unmatched. I think your situation is an outlier rather than the norm, and applicants applying to 3 programs and expecting your results are going to be largely unsuccessful. The best approach is still applying broadly to multiple specialties and then ranking everything. It is important that people keep an open mind about matching and where they can possibly end

You should be more open-minded. There are a lot of really good programs and places to live outside of that over-priced, under-construction, covid-filled, avocodo-toast centred city.

There is not. Though sometimes it can feel like there is. EC involvement in medical school is more based on people being interested than in trying to pad a CV with ECs (since at the end of the day nobody really cares). They typically don't matter too much (maybe research for some specialities), but people still find time to get involved in things they enjoy (research, school plays, interest groups, social events, etc.)

May be a good talking point at interviews if it makes you a more balanced person or if there is some transferrable skill. Doubt anyone would give it a second thought on its own as an EC in your application. It certainly won't make up for deficiencies elsewhere in your application but no harm in briefly working it into an essay or putting it at the end of your CV.

Technically you can ask for a letter at any point (beginning of rotation, end of rotation, 2 years down the road). Everyone will have their own strategy on when to ask for a letter. Then when it comes time to apply for CaRMS, you input your supervisors information into the website and it will send them a link to upload the letter. Usually you will not get to see these letters and you will get a notification when it's uploaded. Then you select which letters to send to which schools and they see only which ones are attached to that application.

This reinforces the importance of getting more letters than needed and diversifying which ones you choose to send to each school. This way if there is one bad one in the mix, you still have a couple schools that might not have received it. Unless you are 100% confident that a letter is amazing, I think it is wise to mix and match from a pool of 5-6 letters.

It can be very easy to become preoccupied with "everybody else" during CaRMS. Usually it can get even worse during interviews when you actually start meeting everyone and realize that they are all nice, amazing people off paper as well. But, at the end of the day it's not all about the CV and really all you can do is try to focus on yourself and do what YOU need to do to be competitive (i.e. focus on electives, write your statements well in advance, build relationships and trust in those relationships). Despite the competitiveness, odds are in your favour that you will match somewhere. All you

The honesty is 100% the right approach is a very naive approach to the world in general, but especially in the medicine world. Now if you are talking about patient care and ethics, then you are absolutely right, but this is not that. There is a difference between being honest and unnecessarily disclosing all of your thoughts for no particular reason other than being "honest". Of course, the approach you take here would depend on your relationship with your preceptors, what specialities you are considering, and the influence your preceptor has on selecting applicants for the program. If you are

I tend to think that family doctors are much more interested in spending time getting to know their patients on a deeper level, often inquiring about their family lives, social supports, social determinants of health, and genuinely looking at the bigger picture. Interviews and patient interactions are slower paced and emphasize a strong patient-physician relationship. A lot of specialists who are more time-limited (even as residents and medical students) just want to get to the main point of the problem, fix it, and move on without much thought to all else going on in their patients lives.