McMaster Health Science VS Queen's Health Science

[John9173]

Hi everyone, 

 

I want to ask your opinion on my following program selections. I am fortunate enough to be accepted to the programs of my choosing, and I now have to decide where I should attend. 

 

Queen's new Health Science (On-Campus) program has been created to "compete" with the previously established McMaster Health Science. I have heard this from both Queen's/Mac students/faculty members. This year, Queen's has a target enrolment of 170 students (last year they over accepted and had around 250+ students), out of close to 6000 applicants (up by 2,000 applicants from the previous year). In contrast, McMaster has a target enrolment of around 240 out of 7000 applicants. 

 

After talking to Queen's Health Science students, and seeing their official transcripts, and comparing that to what McMaster Health Science students tend to get (no official class averages from Mac), it becomes extremely apparent that the class averages of Queen's Health Science is way higher than those of Mac Health Science. While McMaster hosts a high average of 80%+, the Queen's Health Science courses consistently had a 90%+ average (for both first and second-year core classes). This means that many students at Queen's (many of which I know) have averages of 4.0 on the OMSAS scale, whereas not that many Mac Health Science students have 4.0 averages (albeit 3.9+ averages are common).

 

The only issue is that Queen's Health Science will not have a graduating class until 2023, whereas McMaster already has a history of sending students to medical school from their program. But at the same time, I also know that your program doesn't matter and that as long as you have a good GPA, EC's, MCAT, Interview, etc., you will have a shot.

 

My concern is that I may be turning down Queen's, a program that may help me become more competitive when it comes to applying to medical school. Also, I'm not sure how graduate programs will react to the sudden influx of Queen's Health Science students applying to their program, with most of them having extremely high averages (3.9/4.0).

 

Some questions I wanted to ask are: Should the lack of a graduating class be something I take into consideration? What would you do in my position? 

 

Let's assume financial, community life and fun, etc. are not factors. Purely looking at it from a program point of view.

 

P.S.

Here are some screenshots of what Queen's University students provided me. I was told these are the official documents provided to them by their program.

 

 

 

 

[shikimate]

A program with 90+ class average? That's a no brainer. 

I imagine the conversation at some country club where university deans go golfing went like this:

Mac: we have the best program that give out 4.0s and send everyone to med/dent

Qns: hold my beer.

UofT: what's a 4.0?

Laurentian: anyone spare a gold ball?