If physician shadowing requires connections

WayOutWestMom
Tue, 14 May 2019 16:18:44 +0000

@twogirls

Yes, students without family connections to medicine do get into med school. .At D2’s med school graduation, I counted the number of grads who were hooded by physician relatives (parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents) and it was about 1/3 of the class. (One young man had his grandfather, father and mother–who is the Dean of a medical school --on stage with him.) That’s a lot, but it also means that 2/3rd of the class did not come from physician families.

The barriers to medicine are lower for those with family connection–easier access to shadowing, more and earlier exposure to medicine as a career, greater family financial resources, etc, but it does not close the path to medicine for everyone else.

And @thumper --having a family member on staff at a program that hosts a residency program can be a help to Caribbean grad trying to Match in the US, especially if the parent is well- known and respected/liked by other members of the program. PD may interview the applicant as "favor" to the parent and if the student's application package looks reasonable and the interview goes well, they may even rank that student.