re: Ross Unversity Med School

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You should have just taken your arse to an Osteopathic school

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My primary care physician is an Osteopath. He's good at what he does and we like him other than the fact that he went to Ole Miss for undergrad.

I know people with 29-31 MCAT scores that had trouble getting into the urban osteopathic schools on the first try. They are mostly private and don't usually have an "in state" preference like LSU or Alabama does, so it never hurts to apply broadly to schools like PCOM, etc. Most of them do seem to be pretty selective though.

It seems like DO and MD schools in the US are slowly expanding their class sizes....which will probably make it more challenging for Caribbean grads to compete for residency slots eventually.

Good luck.


I read on Wiki, I think, that Ross had just upped their percentage to 55%.

I don't know if that's good or bad.

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The biggest difference in a US MD and a Caribbean is clinical experience. The clinical rotations generally aren't comparable. It's important to train at a large, tertiary care center no matter what specialty you go into or what type of practice you enter after residency. Medicine is so much easier when you've been exposed to the rarest of diseases and don't just read about them in textbooks.

Caribbean grads (and DOs) generally do clinicals and residency at community hospitals where their exposure is limited.

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This all sounds like the opinion and conjecture of a young MD resident who doesn't understand DO or Caribbean curriculums or programs. None of what you've said can be proven as factual one way or another - assuming you're trying to construe it that way.

My girlfriend is a DO from a prestigious osteopathic school (so I suppose I am biased, but I digress) and she matched into a Louisiana MD residency - if anyone would bother learning what exactly a DO is, they'd realize the line between a DO and MD is very thin.

I definitely understand DO and Caribbean programs, and I would like for your to prove anything I've said is wrong. DO is a better option than Caribbean but it's still not close to US MD. Most DO clinicals are preceptor based at community hospitals - not ideal. Like I've said, there are a lot of residency programs your girlfriend or her classmates couldn't interview at. This is fact.

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My girlfriend is a DO from a prestigious osteopathic school (so I suppose I am biased, but I digress) and she matched into a Louisiana MD residency - if anyone would bother learning what exactly a DO is, they'd realize the line between a DO and MD is very thin

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I didn't know what a DO was until a friend of mine went to DO school. I admit to just assuming every physician was an MD before learning that DO's go through pretty much the same curriculum, compete for the same residencies, and practice the same medicine.

And from what I understand, most DO schools aren't exactly easy to get into.

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Like I've said, there are a lot of residency programs your girlfriend or her classmates couldn't interview at. This is fact.

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There are a lot of very competitive residency programs that the average MD grad won't be able to match into as well.

And from a patient's perspective....I know far too many incompetent MD's from American medical schools to conclude that a physician simply having those letters behind their name automatically means they know their arse from a hole in the ground. Physicians in general vary greatly in quality just like every other skilled profession.

That's not on par with most state schools. There are some DO schools with incoming student stats better than bottom tier US MD schools, but they are usually in desirable areas (one of the coasts) and much less competitive than the nearby US MD schools.

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I had a friend was accepted here a couple of years ago. He was turned down by LSU med school numerous times and he was accepted into Ross med school first try. He had an undergrad GPA of 2.9 and scored a 20 on his MCAT. He has another 2 years left until residency.


Has anybody heard of this school? A quick search tells me it is in the Dominica and they basically accept everybody who applies. I think my friend is going to struggle to find a residency once he is finished. But anyways he is trying to tell my other friend, who is smart, to apply for med school at Ross. And I'm saying why would you want to go to a foreign med school especially if you are smart enough to get accepted into a US med school. Can anybody name some advantages?

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Ross is one of the Big3 Caribbean schools. Ross, AUC, and St. George have USMLE passing rates around ~97% which is similar to the US medical schools, and are the only 3 medical schools in the caribbean that qualify for loans from the DOE. All 3 schools have residency placement rates close to the national average for the US schools. Ross just takes alot of ppl, but if your friend has survived the first 2 years of medical school and 2 years living on Dominica (especially after the hurricane last august really f***ed the island up) he is fine, and if he does well on the USMLE will have no trouble getting a residency.

That is a pretty tough match list

Not too many competitive residencies on it