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What Is Royal Caribbean University Of Wow?

Does attending medical school at a reputed Caribbean university affect one's chances of obtaining a residency? If so, how?

  • I hear that a Caribbean med student is at a disadvantage since they need to score considerably higher to land a residency as compared to their American counterparts. Is this true?

  • Answer:

    Yes, it's true.  Caribbean schools are known for teaching specifically for Step I, so a good score from a Carib school doesn't carry the same weight as it will for a U.S. grad.  There's a bigger problem than Step scores though, and that's the percentage of Carib students who don't match at all.  About 95% of U.S. MD graduates matched.  Of the 5% that didn't, most chose not to enter the match because they wanted to do a research year or they changed their minds entirely about medicine.  Only about 50% of Caribbean graduates matched.  That's not counting the 50% of students who started med school in the Caribbean and dropped out at some point. If those numbers aren't bad enough, things are going to get worse for Caribbean graduates in the next few years.  Lots of new medical schools in the U.S. have opened up or expanded their class size, but the number of residency spots hasn't kept up at all.  Caribbean graduates are going to find themselves squeezed out of their usual residency spots, which are none to good to begin with.  They're inevitably in noncompetitive fields such as family medicine and they're generally in undesirable locations.  Bottom line- DO NOT go to a Caribbean school unless you have exhausted all other options, including a year or two of retaking bad grades to get into a DO school.

Andrew Van Atta at Quora Visit the source

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Unfortunately yes, I was involved with residency admissions processes in the past (I won't name which programs, but at UCSF where I work now is not one of them) and some programs won't even look at applications from Caribbean medical schools. It's the nature of the game.  Residency programs want to stock their classes with reliable, hard working residents who can acclimate fast to a difficult training environment and contribute to the vast clinical work load.  An under-performing resident can increase the work load of other residents, attendings and frankly can be dangerous to the patients.  If said residents are also extremely bright and contribute to research, publish, create some kind of innovative health program (like free-clinics, quality improvement) and increase the prestige of the residency program, that's even better. That's not to say Caribbean medical schools don't produce very bright residents.  People simply use past experiences to predict future performance, and if you excelled in college, graduate school etc, you probably would not have been in a Caribbean medical school.

Richard Tsai

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