landed immigrant in canada and i need help,urgently

[Guest sunset33]

hi ,we landed in montreal and i've studying medicine in egypt at cairo university for the last 3 years,medicine in egypt is 6 years ,with no pre-med.i have an american diploma from an american high school in egypt and thanks to GOD i passed both SAT1 and 2, i'm trying to apply to any medical school in canada but no one listens,they all tell me take the MCAT and we'll see,but taking the MCAT means i'll be sitting a year at home,as far as i've known people told me that Mcmaster and university of ottawa are my best options ,cause they dont want any MCAT , and i think Mcmaster is the best option cause it has no prerequisites, but i need to start mylife in canada as soon as possible, and in canada ,there's no guarenteed admission , and i'm scared that i might not be accepted,then i dont know what i'll do , please people your help is needed because i dont know what to do about my position?thanks in advance.

[Guest kaymcee]

Hi sunset33,

 

I, unfortunately, cannot answer your questions regarding the complications of international applications. I do know that there are very few Canadian universities that accept immigrants, but McGill comes to mind as a university that does.

 

Copy and paste this post into the "Temporary General Premed Discussions" or the "Temporary Med Students Discussions". We recently had a bit of a forum disaster where many posts were lost. As a result, many of the older non-Temporary forums have been pretty much abandoned.

 

I'm sorry I can't help, but good luck.

[Guest aneliz]

If you are a landed immigrant (with appropriate paperwork), you will not need to worry about the 'international' application process and you should be eligible to apply to any Canadian medical school. You will be able to apply to a Canadian med school just like any Canadian student would.

 

The bad news is that Canadian med schools are 'second entry' programs... meaning that you must have completed a minimum of 2 years of post-secondary education up to a full undergraduate degree to be eligible to apply. Medical school is then 3-4 years of training depending on the school.

 

Canadian schools as a rule do not take 'transfer' students... especially transfers from other countries. So, you will essentially be starting over again.

 

You are right, there is no such thing as 'guaranteed admission' to medicine in Canada... and you will need to compete for a seat, just as Canadian students do. There are always many more applicants than seats and the competition is tough to get in.

 

Admission to medical school in Canada is based on some combination of the following:

 

1. Undergraduate academic achievement - including specific pre-requisite courses.

2. MCAT scores

3. Reference letters

4. Extra-curricular activities/volunteer work/life experience

5. Interview

 

Each school runs their own admissions process and each school evaluates differently.

 

The other thing to note is that the school year in Canada starts in Sept. Med schools only take students in once per year - in Sept.

 

Generally, the application process is about 1 year long... meaning that to start next Sept, you would need to apply by Oct of this year.

 

Good luck!

[Guest sunset33]

thanks people , but i still , have a problem,i am still without a definite position , i am trying to explain to all the faculties that i have studied 3 years of medicine ,and all i hear is "you have to start all over "and i say i have no problem with that ,they say you need to have a degree in something , so i dont know what to do ?i am willing to throw away 3 years of my life ,but not 7 .And about chemistry and physics and biology and took them in an american high school in egypt.Isnt there like someone to guide me or like tell me what i should do?About Mcmasters?can anyone tell me anything about it , concerning the selection process and admission ,and could they even think about accepting an application from one in my position.McGill requires that i take 2 years that someplace that i cant remember its place now and the MCAT ,anyone if anyone can help or give me an advice or good suggestion about what to do it would be really appreciated.

[Guest Ian Wong]

Hi there,

 

As aneliz has mentioned above, Canadian med schools generally require a minimum of 3 years of undergraduate studies. In general, I think these requirements are only fulfilled if your undergraduate studies were done in North America. This is so that your marks are more easily comparable to the applicants that you are competing against.

 

You are correct that this implies that you would need to redo at least 3 years of undergraduate studies (and more likely 4 years, as the vast majority of applicants accepted to Canadian med schools have completed a full 4 years of undergrad studies), followed by another 3-4 years of medical school (depending on if that med school has a 3 year curriculum, or a 4 year curriculum). As such, you'd have another 6-8 years of studies ahead of you before you'd be able to graduate from a Canadian med school.

 

My advice would be for you to contact the admissions departments for each of the med schools in Canada that you'd be interested in attending, and find out if the above holds true for that particular med school. I suspect that it will in most, if not all cases, as a general statement. You can find a listing of the med school websites at:

 

premed101.com/medschools.html

 

Hope this helps!

Ian

[Guest ploughboy]

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Hey sunset33,

 

You are in a very frustrating situation, and unfortunately there is no quick and easy way for you to get out of it. Applying to medicine in Canada means that you need to jump through a series of (metaphorical) hoops. It is a long and time-consuming process with no guarantee of admission even for "standard" applicants who come through the Canadian education system. Your unusual background will present even more obstacles.

 

- From your message I gather that you are in your late teens or early twenties, and are concerned about life passing you by. Don't focus on that. As aneliz mentioned, medicine is a "second entry" degree in Canada, so you are approximately the same age as most other applicants. A few more years of university (assuming you can afford it) won't make any difference in the long run.

 

So first of all, you need to prepare yourself mentally to face several years before you can seriously apply to most Canadian medical schools. Based on what you've written, I don't think that you will be able to enter a Canadian medical school until at least the fall of 2008. I'm not saying that to be mean. It's important to be realistic about the obstacles you face, so that you can make an informed decision as to whether you want to pursue a medical education in Canada.

 

 

 

1) September 2005

 

You have absolutely no chance of entering a Canadian medical school in the fall of 2005. Interviews took place this spring, offers have gone out, and with the exception of a few spots here and there, all of the classes are full. Any remaining spots will be filled by candidates who have already been interviewed by the schools and who are sitting on the "wait list".

 

 

2) September 2006

 

You have next-to-no chance of entering a Canadian medical school in the fall of 2006. Applications are due in October 2005, and almost all the English-language schools require that you write the MCAT (with the exceptions you've noted - Mac and Ottawa). The MCAT is administered twice a year, in April and August. Registration for the August 20 2005 MCAT has closed, so you will not be able to write it this year.

 

To apply to Mac and Ottawa you need to register with the Ontario Medical School Application Service(1) (OMSAS). You must register with OMSAS by September 15 2005, and your application must be complete -- including transcripts -- by October 3 2005.

 

I do not know how Ottawa U will view your Egyptian education. However, Ottawa requires the completion of university-level pre-requesite courses in such subjects as humanities, biology, chemistry and organic chemistry (the exact requirements are available from the OMSAS website). As some of these pre-reqs themselves have pre-requesites, it is highly unlikely that you can complete all of them in one academic year, especially as it will be very difficult for you to start studying at a Canadian university this fall -- classes start in less than a month (the exception to this is distance education through Athabasca University, I'll write more about that in a minute). Based on that alone, I doubt that your application will be competitive at Ottawa for 2006 entry.

 

If you submit an application to Mac, it will cost you $275. Transcripts will be a problem for you. Mac will require that your Egyptian education be evaluated by World Education Services(2) (WES). This will cost you another $200, and will take one week to process. Mac has the least-restrictive pre-requisites of any medical school in Canada. This means that Mac has the most applicants of any medical school in Canada, and it is very difficult to be accepted to Mac. There were approximately 4000 applicants to McMaster last fall. 800 of them were interviewed, for less than 150 seats in the class. Mac's interview invitations are based heavily on undergraduate GPA. The official GPA cut-off for Mac is 3.0. However, there are many applicants with 3.8, 3.9 and even 4.0 GPAs, and those applicants receive most of the interviews at McMaster. If WES converts your GPA to something lower than 3.8, you should probably spend the $275 on lottery tickets, not on an application to McMaster.

 

 

3) September 2007

 

You might be able to realistically apply in the fall of 2006 for entry in September 2007...

 

IF you spend the 2005/2006 and (if necessary) the 2006/2007 school-year getting your pre-requesite courses, and

IF you do well on the MCAT in either April 2006 or August 2006, and

IF the schools to which you apply don't insist that you have an undergraduate degree from a Canadian or American school and

IF your GPA is converted favourably by WES

 

However, that just gets you to the point of applying. You will still need to do well in a personal interview, and your odds will be no better than the average applicant. Those odds aren't particularly good. I'm from Ontario, and am most familiar with schools there. Last year 4863 people applied for the 690 spots in Ontario medical schools, so just by the numbers your odds are about one in seven of getting accepted.

 

 

4) What I would do if I were you...

 

I don't know a lot about you, only what you've posted. I hesitate to give this sort of advice to complete strangers, but maybe this will serve as a starting point for discussions with people who know you better than I do.

 

Based on the limited information I have, here's what I would do if I were you:

 

a) Get your transcript evaluated by WES, and hope that your GPA is competitive. Do this right away!

 

Visit the websites of all the Canadian medical schools, and determine which schools don't care whether you did your undergraduate work outside North America. Do this by the end of August.

 

c) Contact the admissions offices of the schools you've identified, and make sure they will consider your previous university experience as being the equivalent to undergraduate work. I realize that you were in an MD programme in Egypt, but that will count for very little. The best you can hope for is to have it viewed as undergrad work.

 

d) Determine what pre-reqs each of these schools requires.

 

e) Plan how you can get those pre-reqs as quickly as possible. You're too late to apply to on-campus classes at most Canadian universities for the fall term. Your best bet is probably Athabasca University (3). Athabasca specializes in distance education, and courses can be started any time. Spend the fall and winter getting your pre-reqs.

 

f) Study for the MCAT this fall and winter. Write the MCAT either in April 2006 or August 2006. You will need a score of approximately 10/10/10/P to be competitive at most Canadian schools.

 

 

If your WES GPA is not competitive, or if most schools won't consider your prior work, then quite honestly you will need to have at least three years of full-time undergraduate study at a Canadian university. If you start this fall (through Athabasca, and then possibly transferring to a bricks-and-mortar university), this will consume the 2005/2006, 2006/2007 and 2007/2008 school years, and will cost you lots of money.

 

 

I hope this helps. I don't mean to be discouraging, but it's important for you to understand that getting into a Canadian medical school will be both difficult and time-consuming. It *is* possible, but it's not easy. In my own case, I graduated from a Canadian university with an engineering degree, but I had neither the pre-requesite courses nor a competitive GPA to apply to medical school. It took me two academic years to make myself competitive, and even then I was very lucky that I didn't have to spend a third year waiting to get in.

 

 

Feel free to post any other questions you may have.

 

Good luck!

 

pb

 

 

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(1) OMSAS

(2) WES

(3) Athabasca University

[Guest aneliz]

I know this is not the information that you were hoping to receive... however, the chances of a Canadian school telling you to 'come on over and join our first year class this Sept' are ZERO. If you want to study medicine in Canada, you are going to have to go through the process of applying just like any other student, and this is going to take time. You are not going to be able to start med school tomorrow... or even this year. There are no 'back doors' or 'loopholes' that you will find that will allow you to bypass the process or get in any faster/easier due to your previous education in Egypt unfortunately. You will be competing with all of the Canadian applicants for the same pool of seats... and you will need to fulfill the same pre-req criteria as they do.

 

The biology and physics that you took at an American high school is a good start... however, the med schools require UNIVERSITY level science courses to fulfill their pre-reqs... the courses that you took would be the pre-reqs for the courses required by the med schools.

 

As for somebody to advise you, there is no central person or office that oversees medical school applications/requirements in Canada. Each school runs their own process and makes their own admissions decisions. The requirements and evaluation procedure at each school is unique. You would need to contact the admissions office at each school that you are interested in applying to individually and ask to discuss your specific situation. It sounds like you have begun to do this already.

 

Good luck!

[Guest sunset33]

thank you very much people, i will keep searching untill i GOD willing find a solution, thanks again.

[Guest ofienefie]

Just a suggestion for you.

 

Why not try the medical schools outside Canada. I think UK, Ireland and Australia have 6 yr programs as in Egypt. They may give you an admission. The downside is that you will be an IMG but their degrees are recognized in Canada and it will be easier to come back and practice. You can also try US schools though I think the chance will be slim there.

 

You can also try the carribean schools. You are sure to get an admission there. A lot of them have their clinicals in the US and that will help you to get a residency in the US.

 

These process might be a winding road but if you do not want to waste a lot of time and years trying to get into a Canadian medical school, these might be options to consider.