high schooler to a foreign med school

Bigredmed
Wed, 31 May 2006 19:34:46 +0000

I don’t have a break down for DO’s, but there are only 19 Osteopathic schools. The largest entering classes for anyone of these schools appears to be about 250 students, the smallest about 100. I’ll be generous and assume the average is 200 (which it certainly appears not to be) http://www.aacom.org/colleges/enrollment.asp , then there are only 3800 graduating DO’s.

About a third of them are likely to go into a traditional Osteopathic residency (http://www.aacom.org/data/studentreport/website/index.html - look on page 41). I’ll even use that 31.8% from 01-02 seniors to match up with data set above as best I can.

3800 - .318*3800 = 2591.

Now I totalled an absolute minimum of 1071, without any data from ENT, Neurosurgery, or Urology. Perhaps we can assume those are 0. That leaves us with 1520 students left…of my overstated number of DO grads.

How many total independent applicants are there total? With just data from the NRMP, there were a total of 11994 applications to various match programs.

Now it is important to realize that you can put multiple specialty types on your rank order list, which thereby counts you twice or three times or however many times you ranked different specialties. But there is obviously a finite number of programs you can garner interviews from, and for each different specialty, you need new letters of rec and new essays explaining why you are the perfect candidate for ortho and not derm. So the most that anyone person is likely to rank multiple specialties is probably 3, due to the extra effort, the variation between the specialties and so on. And even the most indecisive people probably have it narrowed down to two really good ideas, seeing how this is going to be one’s career, and doctors don’t exactly have the flexibility to just change from one field to another. But the point is that there is some inflation of the true number of applicants when it is caluculated by total appearences in more than one specialty.

Finally the last component of the independent applicants besides DO and IMG students, are the MD’s who started down one residency and decide to go through the match again…I have no idea how prevalent these people are, but I imagine the stress of going through the match again is likely a strong deterrent - the having to start over, etc. But I know that it does happen - look at Carter on ER, he started out in surgery and moved to ED. If I had to guess, my generous offer would be 1000 people nationwide, which I think would be rather high.

Even then with nearly 12000 independent applicants (as determined by the rank order lists), minus 1000 PostGrad MD’s, and minus the 2500 DO applicants (and lets assume they ALL applied to 2 different specialties), IMG’s still make up 50% of those independent applications, with 6000.

And yet there were only 3904 IMG’s who successfully matched on the initial match. Less than 2/3 of my extremely generous understatement of the number of IMG applicants.

Given all that, I feel pretty safe in assuming that less than 1/2 of all IMG’s that go through the match actually end up with a residency position. And of the most competitive residencies (Derm, Ortho, and Ophthalmology, Plastics) there were only 55 - FIFTY FIVE - out of 1362 positions were filled by IMG’s.

It not just that I’m saying US M4’s have the best chances, but that the chances they have, the advantage they have, is astronomical. And this is with old data that doesn’t include the effect of Step 2 CS. It is w/o a doubt becoming far more difficult for IMG’s to come to the US. Those docs that you speak of had a much easier time getting into this country (and I’m not even going to talk about the issues with visas and students that resulted from 9/11).