Alpha Omega Alpha

[brooksbane]

Oooooooooooooooooooooo

[solocup]

It's an honours society like phi beta kappa but exclusively for medical students. It's not very popular up here but many med schools in America have a chapter. Basically it increases your chances of being accepted into a competitive residency program in the US.

 

In Canada, it's really about whether you did a good job during your rotations and less about these honours society and standardize test scores.

[Ian Wong]

Most Canadian schools either don't have an AOA chapter, or if they do, it's defunct.

 

The question actually came up at UBC way back when I was a med student as to whether we should re-institute it or not, since we apparently had a chapter way back when. Since Canadian residency programs don't use it as a selection criteria, and because it encourages more competition, we as a student body decided not to restart it.

 

In the US, having that designation on your CV can be very important for getting interviews and matching into competitive specialties. Typically, there's both a junior and senior AOA award (one for Med 1+2, and the other for Med 3 and beginning of Med 4), which are only awarded to the top XYZ percentile of the class. These are given out based predominantly on marks and class rank.

 

Sometimes, some med school chapters also take into account other extracurricular things, but in general, to get AOA, you need to have great marks in a US med school.

 

Ian

[Dr.Cave]

So how would that wourk at a pass/fail school

[a41]

Some schools take into account Step 1 scores as well.