Who is the foriegn / international medical graduates’ chief competition? Is it the American Graduate? or the other international medical graduates?
Doing well on the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) is very important, obviously! In applying for residency in the USA, an IMG is up against the American graduates as well as other IMGs.
In our opinion, your chief competition are the other IMGs. Why?
Residency programs that don’t take IMGs, well they usually DON’T take IMGs. There will be exceptions from time to time of course, but this is the pattern in general. In short, there are “IMG-friendly” programs. There is of course no official published list that can conveniently guide you in this matter. The best source of information is your friends and colleagues that are already in the USA. You can also get information from blogs (like this one!) and forums on the internet. (For the uninitiated: A forum is a website or a part of a website where one is allowed to post a question and other forum members try to answer that question and provide information. Do a Google search.)
In this background, consider this…the number of IMGs who score very well on USMLE is very high. Some might even call it ridiculously high. The “99, 99″ is so common nowadays that it no longer stands out. What stands out are people who don’t have “99, 99″. If you are one of those, be prepared to be asked “What happenned?”. Yeah, it’s that ridiculous!
So you see, you are competing for those “IMG friendly” programs with the other international medical graduates.
Bottom line? The competition for residency program spots is stiff. So prepare well and Good Luck!!
