Getting into medical school is hard. According to recent statistics, both applicants and University enrollment have been increasing. The desire to become a doctor is at an all-time high and many claim that the hardest part of medical school is actually getting in. Whether or not that statement is true remains debatable. This article aims to give a short list of the hardest non-clinical struggles medical students have. As a subjective piece, some …
CaRMS CVs: Writing them Right
Originally published by Brent Thoma on August 31, 2013. Expert reviewed and re-published on September 23, 2014. How time flies. About 4 years ago at this time I was in Edmonton on an Emergency Medicine elective when the CaRMS website opened to applicants. The next few months were a blur of an empty word document in need of a personal letter, many frantic e-mails to my references (that I tried to make sound …
CaRMS Application Preparation
Originally posted on May 24, 2013. Staff Review added on September 16, 2014. It seems like match season only just finished. And yet, as the last of the Saskatchewan snow drifts left us, a new crop of medical student clerks (or, as we call them on the prairies, JURSIs) began preparing to sweat through the annual ritual they had been hearing stories about since their earliest premed days: CaRMS. Of course, with CaRMS …
10 Tips from Nurses to Rock Your EM Clerkship
There are lots of ways to prepare for clerkship, like finding mentors, reading up, and making learning goals, as outlined in this past post. While those tips will help you maximize your skills building and demonstrate your professional competencies, it’s also important to use clerkship as an opportunity to learn how to work as part of an interdisciplinary team within a complex health care system. There is growing recognition that quality care and …
The Reference Letter Triple Crown
Interviews for the Canadian Residency Matching Service (CaRMS) are over and they were as difficult as ever. One thing nobody appreciates on the medical student side of the CaRMS equation is how difficult it is for the programs to come up with our rank list. The applicants this year were spectacular and ranking them was more difficult than splitting hairs. Fortunately, the depth of the applicants makes us confident that we will be …
Top 10 Ways to Rock EM Clerkship
In our commitment to keeping posts up-to-date, this post was updated by Eve Purdy in December 2014. You’re a bright-eyed young medical student and you think you want to be an emergency doctor. You haven’t made life easy for yourself. While it may not be the case in other parts of the world, Emergency Medicine in Canada has become a highly sought-after specialty. The stats from our matching service indicated that last year …