How to Become a Doctor in Canada: Free Workshop for Grades 8-11

We will start with the part most families never plan for. Most Canadian medical schools reserve the large majority of their seats for residents of their own province. Ontario has moved to reserve at least 95 percent of its medical school seats for Ontario residents, with 5 percent for the rest of Canada. UBC gives preference to BC residents, reserves up to 33 of its 328 seats for out-of-province applicants, and asks those applicants for an 85 percent average against 75 percent for BC applicants. The University of Alberta reserves 85 percent of its seats for Alberta residents. We will explain what that means for a family deciding where their child will study. We will then cover what medical schools actually score, which is undergraduate GPA, the MCAT and the interview, and why no Canadian medical school requires a specific undergraduate degree, so the instinct to pick the hardest science program can work directly against the GPA being measured. We will then take the question we get asked most, which is whether to go overseas. Medical schools in the UK, Ireland and Australia admit students directly from high school into five or six year programs, which skips the Canadian undergraduate race and can save two to three years. The trade-off sits at the other end, because the real bottleneck for practising in Canada is residency rather than medical school, and Canadian and international graduates are matched in separate streams with far fewer positions open to international graduates. We will lay out both routes side by side, the time, the cost and the odds, so your family can make that call on evidence. We will close on the high school decisions that carry forward either way: which Grade 11 and 12 courses keep both routes open, what kind of volunteering and work experience holds up years later, and how families in Grades 8 through 10 should pace this.

Parents and students in Grades 8-11 are both welcome. The session is live on Zoom, and we email the link and a short summary after you register.