Jay

at 22, you are very young and certainly have plenty of time to pursue medicine here in the US. It is expensive but loans are available. You have not mentioned if you are a college graduate. I would encourage you to investigate what you need to do to get into medical school in the US before going abroad; SDN has lots of resources for this. Best of luck to you.

Sorry, I didn’t realize that people were still leaving comments here! Yes, it IS me. If you register on SDN, you can PM me…of course, its a year later so you probably won’t check this note!

You are undoubtedly doing a very great job on SDN.You are really helping thousands of USMLE aspirants thro’ your advices and opinions.
Best of luck.
Best Regards.

Sincerely,

Dr.Aamer Rashid(SDN ID:Winner123)

What would make me whole, is to be able to go to medical school…I’m 22 years old. while in High school, my mother became very ill, with a car accident…So I had to stop going to school and work to help at home…My mother didn’t have any type of insurance besides de car insurance, which was supposed to help her, since it was a drunk truck driver that hit the back of my mother’s car…Today we still struggle financially… I always had good grades in school, I enjoyed getting good grades making teachers and my mother proud..but i had to get a GED. My guidance counselor, feels for me…but he also feels that medical school…is too far from me…( shouldn’t guidance counselors motivate?) I went to Brasil with hopes of studying there, being that is more affordable…I took a test there, in which is required to go to medical school…and is a very few vacancies per over 800 students struggling for the same opportunity… and I passed!!!I stayed for few months more, but my mom could not afford to help me there anymore… there I cannot work and study at the same time because of the economy…Here I would have a better shot at working part time, so I’m back in New Jersey. It’s the only thing I will do with my heart … I will be much older than my friends when I become able to start paying off student loans…while I have friends in the business industry, same age making thousands or even millions…I ‘m aware!!! Everyone and everything around me ( besides my mom, who strongly believes in me) kind of tell me…that I’m living in a cloud, that i should put my feet on the ground…and what i have to do is make money…Do business administration, finances, whatever in the “money making field” it’s what they call it…With all the struggle you went through, Dr. Cox…Should I stay on top of the cloud, until it becomes my ground ?

Jay

So here’s the question:

Did you work for Neurology Service at the VA Medical Center in Fresno, California in the early ’90s?

Jay

I don’t imagine that I had any more difficulty getting into a US residency than anyone else trained abroad. There were some programs which refused to accept applications from outside the US unless you already had your ECFMG certificate, which would have meant taking a year off because of timing differences for me.

However, I probably had some advantages…

1) I had worked for nearly 10 years in the medical field before school and had some contacts; so there were schools which don’t traditionally take IMGs for electives that took me

2) I applied to surgery when it was at a low popularity, so there was a better chance of matching

3) I “interview well”. Of course, one has to get to the interview stage and I’m sure there were some programs which were not interested in me, for whatever reason – average USMLE scores, IMG status, etc.

4) being an American citizen helps obviously and as much as I hate to admit it, several places told me they didn’t really consider me an “IMG”, unlike students from the Caribbean or other countries. May not be fair, and wasn’t the case at every program, but schools do look at where you trained.

Glad to hear that you followed your own bliss rather than listen to others; sometimes we REALLY do know ourselves best.

I’d love to help you out with electives, but you can’t get me out of New Jersey and back home out west fast enough! So I doubt I’ll be here during your 4th year, but I’m sure the Surg Onc dept at UMDNJ could help you out.