Choose your medschools carefully

Choosing which schools you will spend your precious time on is a worthwhile effort if you are to get from point A to point M(edical School X). This will both save you time and increase your chances of success. Unless you print money, I do not see a lot of sense in applying blindly everywhere, just because you can. This strategy can seem fail safe, but in the long term you will realize that you have a brain for a reason, and in most real life situations you cannot go 'all out'. That is where prioritizing comes to play. Priorities are the determining factor when you are wondering about going out on that weekend trip with your buddies instead of learning translational motion equations or the anatomy of the nervous system.

So, let us get started on priorities. To choose schools you will have to have stringent criteria. Here are some of the most obvious ones:

• Tuition. Plain and stupid : can you pay for it if you get in? While, of course my dear mate, what could be easier? Nevertheless, take a calculator (a pen and a paper if you are studying for the MCAT - yes, I am that obsessed) and jot down your annual tuition fees, ancillary fees, equipment fees, possible relocation fees and cost of living. Make sure you double check it with somebody who has an understanding of living on their own. Budgets tend to seem simpler than they are when you are cut loose...
• Do THEY need you? This relates to all the limitations each school can impose. For example, applicants to McMaster Medical School outside the welcoming province of Ontario enjoy a 10% quota of the available places. Will this limit your chances? Hmmm
  This also includes the GPA/MCAT/EC requirements. Make sure you are at least at the threshold in every category. Although in that case your chances might be slim and you would have to have a special achievement to blow the admissions office out of their comfortable leather chairs. In the good sense, that is.

Canada enjoys 17 medical faculties total, which I list below in no special order:

• Memorial University of Newfoundland
• McMaster University
• Dalhousie University
• University of Western Ontario
• Université Laval
• Northern Ontario School of Medicine
• Université de Sherbrooke
• University of Manitoba
  
• Université de Montréal // my tips - here
• University of Saskatchewan
• McGill University // my tips - here
• University of Alberta
• University of Ottawa
• University of Calgary
• Queen's University at Kingston
• University of British Columbia
• University of Toronto

Over the next weeks I will try to get some useful insider info about each and every one of those. Note: This will be info you cannot usually find on the websites listed above.