IMG’s Path, the Saga Continued

“Good news, everyone!”, Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth, Futurama

Turns out it has been six months since my last post and, as I have some news to share, here is what I’ve been up to since the december of 2021. To recount this story I must go back to August 2021 as it is then the application time for several university programs begins.

As an IMG my options were the following:

• apply for CaRMS again,
• redo 4 years of med school from the beginning
• or try to join the med school with advanced standing ( a 2 year program that was created for people like me).

However, due to my failure to match or to get accepted into med schools the first time I decided to cast a wider net this time round and have applied not only to medicine, but also to nursing. Most of the programs would have begun in the Autumn of 2022, apart from two: one of which was a winter semester in nursing and another a MD IMG that begins in late April. I’ve judged that my chances to match to the residency program have not improved much since the previous failure, thus I decided not to apply again for CaRMS. So it was that late in August I received an offer of admission to the winter semester in nursing. As I would not know whether or not any med school is interested in me up until March or even April of the following year, I’ve accepted the offer because this way if I don’t get it, I’d have an almost finished semester in nursing by that time.

One major thing about this offer was that it required everyone to do a placement French exam and, if need be, add an additional course to my curriculum as it is the curriculum is taught in French. Well, guess what? Yours truly have scored just 3 points below the cut off mark and was assigned a writing course. Thus, at the end of January I joined the crowd of fresh faced twenty-somethings in search of professional self-betterment.

Another feature to differentiate my second uni experience from the first amongst more obvious ones is the approach to teaching. At the Nursing Faculty of UdeM they do not have lectures or master classes, instead they use the reversed learning or flipped teaching. Which means to cite Wikipedia “instructional strategy and a type of blended learning, which aims to increase student engagement and learning by having pupils complete readings at home and work on live problem-solving during class time”. Basically, before the class the student gets a reading list with particular topics to be discussed and used in class to solve problems. The latter is called APP (approche par problème) or competency-based approach within the case of nursing APSICs (Apprentissage par situation infirmière clinique) which are basically situational cases that one might encounter as a nurse. For instance, it might be a story of an elderly person struggling with declining cognitive capacities and a mix of accompanying comorbidities. One is supposed to read up on the relevant points of physiology, pathology, pharmacology and interventions that might be pertinent. Then when in class one is supposed to discuss the case, share the information one has gathered with other students under the guidance of a tutor. The latter is the one person of authority, as it were, and serves as an ultimate source of knowledge on more complicated topics (sometimes successfully, other times less so). Because of it, as you might have guessed, a lot depends on the said tutor as when one is not familiar with the topic in question how one should know if one is in the right or not, if one has read enough or way too little. Overall, I loved my time there and have thoroughly enjoyed both the company of other students, that of tutors and of invited guests. It has given me another point of view on the functioning of a healthcare team and functioning of different members of it.

Then, sometime in March I received an email from the MD IMG program notifying me of being accepted and instructing me on further steps to be taken.