My first suggestion is to check at www.med.ubc.ca in
order to determine whether you meet the BC residency
requirements. If you do, attending UBC Med just gotabout 50X easier.
I'm loving UBC medicine at the moment, with about 5
weeks left in our first year. I think the teaching
has been top-notch, and the PBL curriculum, while
sometimes a pain (you can't ever slack
off), really keeps material fresh in your mind.
With PBL, each week you discuss a new medical case,
and this means that you must do independant learning
in order to come to each PBL course prepared. This is
in sharp contrast to undergrad, where you can blow off
a week if you don't feel like studying, and still
catch up later.
In PBL, if you haven't done the
preparation, you usually look unprepared, and that's
pretty embarrassing, especially if it happens
frequently. On the other hand, it's a far more
interesting way to learn material than sitting in
lectures, and usually in PBL, there's a lot of
emphasis placed on clinically-significant detail. You
don't tend to waste a lot of time on detail that isn't clinically relevant.
We've been exposed to patients since the first month
of classes, and in our clinical skills course we're
being taught the various physical examinations of the
human body as we learn about them in PBL and lectures. Hopefully this will make us more caring and competant doctors when we graduate.
The university itself is beautiful (what part of BC
isn't?), although the buildings are fairly old.
There's opportunities for sports, student government,
and artistic endeavours, and you do have the time to take up a hobby or two.
What's bad? It takes a heck of a long time to become
a good doctor, and the time demands are larger than
most other professions. The cost of failure is
dramatically higher too. Mess up in most professions and either you, or your boss will lose some money. Making a mistake in this field puts someone's health in jeopardy. Because of that, you'll be busy studying while all your non-med friends graduate, find jobs, and go travelling.
As to getting in after three years, why the rush? In
the long run, say, when you're forty years old, an extra year here or there isn't going to make much difference. If you are trying to enter medical school after three years, you'll have to compress four years of medical school prerequisites into three years. That means taking all the required courses, writing the MCAT, coming up with the application money, meeting the professors to obtain good reference letters, volunteering, in a shorter span of time while never compromising your marks and outside hobbies.
It's not easy to do; this year only about 10 students
out of 120 got in after third year. However, given
your desire, I do think you should apply after third
year. You might get in, saving you a year of
undergraduate tuition, but even if you don't, you'll
get a better feel for the application process, and
hopefully gain some experience in the medical school
interviews, which are the final barrier before entry.
My final thoughts are that I'm personally glad that I
entered med school after third year, but not everyone
will find that to be true. Many of my friends are
even taking a year off after fourth year of undergrad
to rest up before they apply to med school.
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