1st language not English - good or bad?

[Guest Dax]

Hi all,

 

Does anyone know if having English as a second language is a good thing or a bad one with the UBC Admissions Board?

 

Cheers, and good luck to all who are also waiting for an email...

[Guest Ian Wong]

If your grasp of the spoken language is good, then you shouldn't have any difficulties. On the other hand, if your spoken language is poor, that could certainly come across negatively during your interviews (since all of your classes are conducted in English, and obviously a high level of verbal fluency is needed in medicine where communication skills are paramount and misunderstandings can have grave consequences). My class had a number of people with excellent English skills who still have the accents from their primary language; that's not an issue. Certainly, it's a great benefit to have fluency in other languages given the huge spectrum of people that you'll meet and treat throughout med school and the rest of your career.

 

Ian

[Guest canstowski]

Yea, my first language is not english either. I've never considered that as an obstacle in my application. Although i still have an accent and my word choice is poor at times, i think i can still get my ideas and opinion across....at least i think...:\

[Guest Dax]

Thanks for your comments, Ian. Here's another one for you, or anyone else in this kind of position.

 

Writing the MCAT in a language other than my 1st language (French) proved to be a lot more challenging than I expected for the VR part. I've been living on the West coast for nearly 10 years, but I felt I was lacking a lot of background in the English culture, which seemed to affect comprehension of literary pieces (result: poor VR score).

 

I guess what I'm wondering is if they'll take the candidate's MCAT writing in their 2nd language into account when evaluating the whole application, or will this be irrelevant. Any thoughts appreciated.

[Guest canstowski]

I think the MCAT this year is pretty much a NON issue. UBC requires you only to write the MCAT instead of getting certain required MCAT scores. From what i've heard, i'm getting the impression that UBC only use MCAT scores when two candidates have almost identical interview/file review scores. However, cases like these are pretty rare. In any events, i did pretty poor on my VR too!