Organomegaly

To be fair a higher proportion also choose less competitive specialties, and the highest proportion of students that chose family medicine 1st are from McMaster https://www.carms.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/2019_r1_tbl38e.pdf

Speaking as a senior resident in a medicine program that has also been involved in CaRMS selection. Your evaluators will NOT care the process by which you were selected for medical school. They will barely even recognize that. What will matter is your interpersonal skills and clinical competence. Period. All medical schools will be adversely affected by COVID. This is not a Mac unique problem, Mac being a year shorter wont matter because all schools will have to contend for overlapping cohorts contending for experiences. There is only so much clinical availability for opportunities.

School. And no, the housing page is not school specific. Ask your classmates/upper years for a link to it.

Also, when it comes time for electives and CaRMS (a large hidden cost of medical school): use the medical student housing FB page instead of AirBNB. AirBNB can be a rip off...

Make sure you are proactive about applying to medical school grants! There are often many hidden gems. I applied to this relatively hidden bursary which I thought would be for a tiny amount by writing a small one page essay. Ended up getting $20,000 from the bursary. Some colleagues have had similar luck.

Where did they already announce the rate hike for the fall? I didn't see that anywhere...

Rates are still the lowest they've been in many years. With the economy doing so well recently its not a surprise the rates are coming up, however the trade disputes with the USA are probably going to dampen the rate of increase over the year so most likely it wont increase every quarter as it has recently https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2018/07/fad-press-release-2018-07-11/

Thank you - I didn't study super intensely before the exam but studied fairly consistently over all of clerkship which I think paid off the most.

Will help for U of T if you have the publications to show for it

Although I disagree with his comment that the home school advantage is not a real thing (it is for sure), a lot of what you say here has more to do with the city than the school itself. People simply favour the city of Toronto over many other cities. It IS a world-class city, no doubt. But you imply here people pick U of T for some sort of prestige or superiority over other educational experiences. In my experience, having known dozens of people from my undergraduate program who made the decision between Toronto and other Ontario medical schools, it was typically for the city that people went

it's a cute town to visit but i'd hate to be there for four years

you mean pre-clerkship electives, but yeah, those electives in the summer can be very helpful.

Oh yes no doubt that NBMEs are good exams. Challenging, but good. People will complain of the few American oriented questions but 95% of the test is equally suitable for a Canadian cohort that it becomes a moot point to complain about.

They must repeat the exam, at least for internal medicine. The NBME has several exam forms and they can offer different versions of the test. For the PPIs, they'll continue to monitor your progress on future PPIs to see how you compare to your peers. For what its worth, there was a study that showed failing any NBME exam gave an odds ratio of ~10 for failing the LMCC.

Two people failed the Internal Medicine NBME in my stream. Not mentioned here is the PPI score. You're compared to your class mates on the basis of your mark compared to the class average. If you fall below 1.5 to 2.0 standard deviations on a consistent basis, you may get flagged for academic concerns and referred to the APC. But that's very few people.

I think the pass mark is 60. Not sure what that equates to for percentile. Definitely agree about the US students studying more for them. It's too bad, because they're actually very well-written exams and students could learn a lot by preparing for them.

You should definitely go to the three year school in your case! The benefit of a 4 year over a 3 year program is subjective. With good planning, a 3 year program will get you everything you need in a year less time. The benefit of a 4 year is theoretically you have more time to decide specialties and do research. But if you aren't proactive about how you spend your time in summers and between classes then the difference would quickly become moot. The theoretical benefit could be more summers = more research = better match to competitive specialties. But how can we say that a 4 year school

The grade inflation aspect is true across Ontario for sure. However, the averages are not the same at health sciences compared to life science programs. The average is probably closer to ~96% in a typical first year entry BHSc class. It is definitely lower than that in other life science programs. High school GPA is not a perfect metric, but it has been shown to reliably correlate with success in university. Another aspect that differentiates the health sciences cohort is the supplementary application: this is the bigger factor, in my opinion, as it requires solid communication skills to

I thought we could start doing horizontals starting in October? I definitely did some in October.

most of us did research during the school year. the flexibility of pre-clerkship allows for this. I did two projects that I carried over into clerkship.

Which is fine imo

Good luck to everyone. Please try and get some sleep tonight. No matter the outcome, some sleep will make tomorrow a better day. If anyone receives an offer to McMaster and has questions about the program feel free to DM me. And remember that you are worth more than an admissions offer!!! Keep your heads up high.

Mac generally performs about middle of the pack on the LMCC Part I and slightly above average on the LMCC Part II actually

I have written all of my Step exams bar the Step 3. I actually strongly agree with this. The Step 1 is a frustrating exam. That exam WILL test minutiae, histology, biochemical enzymes, obscure pathology knowledge, etc that will never be called upon clinically. The Step 1 almost tests your ability to assimilate a large fund of knowledge and work hard. Though as rmorelan has mentioned, success on it correlates with success in residency and fewer patient complaints. The Step 2 CK, in contrast, is a very good exam. It will test your ability to apply clinically relevant knowledge. There