Monday, December 7, 2009

Residual Stress and the Mysterious CARMs

Monday, December 7, 2009
So, my next blog post will be about the "stress" that I've been experiencing lately. Really, the pre-clinical years in a Canadian Med School should be pretty chill. Your not on rotations or clinical work yet, and for the most part a lot of the pressure to get a A+ (since it doesn't exist anymore) is gone. You get either a H, P, F or a P, F (H: Honors, P: Pass, F: Fail) depending on which Canadian school you go to.

However, I think that I still have some of that residual pre-med keener still roaring inside of me, and I can't help but stress about small things. One of the things that I have been stressing about is the CARMs match I will have to undergo in 4 years time (it's a program in Canada that matches a MD graduate to the residency/specialty that they want) and how I am supposed to prepare for it. The only problem with this is that I have no idea what I even want to do yet, aside from the fact that I want to work with patients (so probably no to radiology, pathology, and the laboratory-based specialties). And if you don't really even know what you want to do, there really is not much of a way to prepare for it (aside from basic stuff like get involved in activities and trying not to fail a course).

The one aspect of CARMs that really does stress me out is my lack of knowledge concerning the weighting of the different components of the application. Does research count for a lot of your evaluation? How much research is enough research? Is it really the reference letters/clinical rotations in the latter bit of my MD that matters?

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