Moving to UBC from the US?

[Guest djfir0]

hi everyone, im currently attending the university of texas, and hold a 3.896 gpa with around 65 hours of credit. i have been accepted to UBC as a 3rd year BS bio major, and was wondering like how the difficulty of ubc will be compared to my current school or US schools in general. i really need help since i don't know anyone in vancouver. my biggest question is what will i need in order to get into ubc med school, i was looking at there avg admission stats and its something like a 35.6 mcat score?????? that is like higher than the TOP us med schools... this honsetly scares the SH** out of me. also i REALLY need some sort of volunteer research, if any of you can point me in that direction it would be greatly appreciated, thanks a LOT.

 

 

 

 

Edited the subject to get rid of the all capital letters. Please don't type in all-caps as it's tough to read. Thx! -Ian

[Guest aneliz]

First thing...RELAX!!!

 

You don't tell us why it is that you are moving to BC from Texas...but I will assume that you are a Canadian returning home.

 

If UBC has given you credit up to the third year level, they must feel that the courses you have taken are equivalent to the first and second year level courses at UBC...and that those courses that you have taken are equivalent to their pre-reqs... Not everyone is so lucky...and many people that transfer schools lose more than a few credits in the process. So, your courses must be fairly identical in content (not necessarily teaching or examination style) to the comparable course at UBC.

 

As for your question about direct comparison between US undergrad and UBC...well, that is kind of a tough one to answer...given that there are likely very few (if any) people that post here that have attended both an American and a Canadian undergrad institution for the same degree that could do that kind of comparison. I would think that it should be similar...

 

I don't know much about UBC admissions...probably some of the UBC students could give you a better idea about that.

 

Good luck!

[Guest Ian Wong]

I don't think anyone can tell you about the difficulty levels of UBC relative to the University of Texas (there's probably only a handful of people out there who've done undergraduate studies in both universities), and more importantly, the difficulty is obviously going to be very dependant on your individual strengths and course selection.

 

The bottom line is that I'm sure people have achieved highly and gotten into very competitive med schools coming from either school, so there's no reason to say that you couldn't do so as well.

 

It will be very tough to get into UBC medical school if you are not a Canadian citizen, and do not have BC resident status. UBC only takes a handful of people per year who have out-of-province status, and as far as I know, doesn't take any international students at all.

 

I assume that you have already visited the UBC admissions website, given your familiarity with this year's statistics (although the listed MCAT's for accepted people this year are actually even a bit higher than what you quoted). I'm still not convinced that this is not a statistical error.

 

Anyway, there's a ton of information in this UBC forum as well as the archived UBC forum near the bottom of the main page. Please take a browse through it as a lot of undergrad questions have been posted and answered already on this forum, including volunteer opportunities in BC. Welcome to the forums, and to Vancouver!

 

Ian

[Guest McCarey007]

There's no need to worry about the MCAT scores. I'm sure everyone would agree that there is something fishy going on with those MCAT scores posted on line. They are way too high. So like most other med schools in Canada, as long as you have a minimum of 8 or 9 in each section, you should be okay.

 

Historically, UBC required a minimum of 7 in each category...but they don't have a minimum anymore. The MCAT was used as a flag or a tie-breaker, but nobody really knows how the MCAT factors in anymore.