high schooler to a foreign med school

Bigredmed
Tue, 30 May 2006 20:03:37 +0000

Okay, that was a long post to type.

A couple of things:
Besides any rounding errors, any initial match numbers that don’t match up to the %ages of the successful applicants are due to physicians already in training who change their mind on the field they are in and decide to reapply to the match. May also be due to applicants who took a transitional PGY-1 year and had to reapply to the match.

The numbers, even in 2002, speak for themselves. Yes, as an International medical Graduate (IMG) you can get into some of the competive fields. But, their is a significant advantage to being a US Senior going through the match. Even in fields that have a lot of IMG’s, like pathology and Internal Med, the placement rate of US seniors is much, much higher than those of the IMG’s. And like I said, this is 2002, before the intro of the Step 2 CS part of the USMLE, which must be passed in order to take USMLE Step 3. I imagine that the CS requirement has further enhanced the difficulty for IMG’s who are not native English speakers.

For example, lets look at path:
Pathology:
639 applicants (214 US Seniors)
398 positions
83.7% fill rate on initial Match (333)
Sucessful applicants: 62.7% US seniors (209), 29.7% IMG (99), 4% DO (13)
US seniors made up only 214/639 applicants - or 33.5% of applicants, yet were almost double that % of successful matchs at 62.7%

For Medicine - which is where you go for cardiology, oncology, or GI:

Internal Medicine:
9551 applications (5146 US seniors)
6297 positions (4622 categorical and 1675 prelim)
94.3% filled on initial match (5938)
Successful applicants: 62.3% US Seniors (3700), 29.4% IMG (1746), 5.6% DO (333)
% of US seniors unmatched who only ranked Internal Medicine positions: 1.6%

US seniors were 53.9% of all applicants, and yet ended filling 62.3% of the slots. What’s important to recognize here though is that Medicine is often listed as a “safety” of sorts for people who either are unsure of what they want to go into, or intelligent enough to add if they are applying to very competitive specialties. Because as I mentioned, being an “applicant” for a specialty only means you ranked at least one program on the rank list for the match, with no indiciation of where that was ranked. I put the unmatched rate there to demonstrate that if you really want to IM as a US senior, you are very likely to match somewhere.

The fact remains that going to a International medical school is not a good idea if you want to practice in the US.