burneraccount909

Just a thought to all of you applying this year OOP. Yes, it will likely be more competitive, but probably not as much as you think. 518+ MCAT's are still extremely rare. My guess would be that most of those added applicants are not highly competitive, but people who thought that the uncertainty from COVID gave them a chance. Also, Premed101 is not indicative in any way of actual applicants, so asking for stats here does nothing more than to feed your anxiety. Take it from someone who repeatedly checked Premed101 when applying last year, stay off of this site!

You can email Sask's Admissions team and they will provide you with the U of A to U of S GPA converter and how to use it!

If anyone hasn't seen it yet, there is a WhatsApp group where we are planning meetups for this week. The link is in the C2024 FB group!

Also have grown to support these programs over time! I agree with your assessment; the disdain a lot of people have for these programs is usually born out of selfish worry, not hate for any group! My biggest issue with these programs when I used to disagree with them was that they take a blanket approach to all applicants of a single race, when the issue is much more nuanced than a blanket approach allows for. If schools are truly trying to account for systemic biases, it would be better IMO to approach it from an intersection of SES and race rather than just race. That being said though, know

All 16. In my opinion, you may as well fill them all out - it can't hurt you. You never know what will resonate with a reviewer, and the only way you're guaranteed not to get a point for an activity is by not putting it down.

With how much free help I received on here and several other forums when I was applying, I think it would be deeply unethical for me to profit off of pre-meds now that I'm in medical school. I've been contacted a few times to join on with those companies (which is a sign I'm probably too active on these forums) and it gets my back up every time. It makes me happy to see that pretty much everyone here agrees with that POV, and I'm continually impressed with how supportive this community is as a whole!

That's based on anecdotal experiences of people on **DELETED**, definitely not what you want to be basing your perspective on. And to add to that, the majority of people in the thread that comment on the $120k+ salaries are in exasperation about how high they are, so it doesn't really prove your point as most people there seem to agree that those salaries are far from the norm. I gave you real data from a salary report, I don't know what your argument is here. ^^^^^^^ I don't get why people over-estimate job prospects so much, it does absolutely nothing for them. It's beneficial to be

That's a common belief but isn't true. Take a look at this link: https://www.payscale.com/data/tech-industry-salaries. Average start, while awesome, is still only ~$110k at the big 3 social media companies (Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn). There might be a few people making $200k right out of high school, but again that's the top 1% of the 1% considering how hard it is to land a job in a big Silicon Valley tech company and even harder to excel once you're there (much much harder than getting into medicine). And mid-career numbers don't increase like you think they might (Twitter has a $157k m

I'd give you a like if I had any left to give for today! You hit on some good points for sure - the 10% is definitely a simplification on my part but even if it's 2% I think the argument still holds. I don't know if I would say there are a lot of jobs that compare to average FM/low-billing specialists unless we're well into the top 1% of most other fields, which in my mind isn't really the argument. And we'll have to agree to disagree on the level of uncertainty that most other fields have when it comes to reaching that upper tier. If I'm being honest, my experiences tell me it's not as bad as

^ Something to think about for sure! Don't know if we can lump all healthcare professionals in with us as many don't aspire to medicine when they start out. If they all did, some of us wouldn't be here. A more apt comparison might be that we're the top ~10% of pre-meds? It's less about who is in your field really, and more who you're competing with for jobs. That's about the national acceptance rate if I recall correctly, and pre-meds are the ones who actually try to become doctors. Do the top 10% in any other "field" have all (or any) of the career benefits that medicine has? I wouldn't

I think we agree here, my only concern is that I don't want pre-meds to think your situation is the norm. I personally know a lot of people in those corporate type of roles as well, but they are far and away the exception to the rule. A lot of them also have terrible quality of life because of the amount of work, and type of work they do (getting up at 5 AM, living at the office working with numbers and talking on the phone all day, and then getting home at 9 PM). Medicine definitely isn't for everyone, but you do get to do amazing work, have job security pretty much as soon as you're accepted

Agreed on the money thing! We tend to over-inflate the cushiness of medicine, when really it's an incredibly difficult journey to staff, and even when you get to being staff it is still time-intensive and stressful. The money thing is nice, but it's secondary to quality of life and if you don't absolutely love medicine, it's not worth it to chase the money doctors make. In regards to other fields, I agree that we shouldn't prop medicine up on a pedestal, but I think it's important to look at everything else from a realistic lens as the comments in this thread have tried to do. Much of my ne

Exactly! Although this extends to pretty much any field right now...

That's my bad for lumping it in with medicine which is the truly safe bet! I'm more looking at it statistically. Average law salaries are up around $100k/year ($96k in my province - Alberta) which is much better than fields that are thought of similarly like engineering. Definitely not a cushy job at all and I definitely wouldn't want to be a lawyer for all the reasons you listed, but on average is significantly better paying than it's counterparts.

I wish that we did a better job of educating kids on the economic realities of most professions. I'll admit that when I entered engineering school, I thought I would be making $200-$300k by the middle of my career. This couldn't be further from the truth, but how was I supposed to know that when everyone's perception of the field is that you make a ton of money in it? And even if you read that engineers on average make about $70k per year, there's always that thing inside you that goes "oh yeah, but I won't be an average engineer." In reality, an average engineer is an extremely smart and comp