|  | | | Oct. 12, 2002. 07:37 AM |   |  Printer friendly version |
 Mail this story to a friend | | Student follows dream to U.S. | | Jason Kinkartz has grades to study here, but there's no room | Mary Gordon
TORSTAR NEWS SERVICE |
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| DAVID OLDS FOR TORSTAR NEWS SERVICE |
| GONE TO U.S.: Jason Kinkartz in lab class at Michigan State University's College of Human Medicine. |
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Jason Kinkartz was eating dinner when the phone rang, so he let the machine pick up the call, and record words he had both dreamed about and dreaded. A few weeks earlier, two American medical schools - one in Michigan, the other in Albany, N.Y. - had interviewed him. Kinkartz, who was born and raised in Toronto, had vowed he would never study in the United States, unlike many Canadian medical school hopefuls he had read about in newspapers."I was disgusted by it, actually," the 26-year-old said. "I said to myself, 'I want to be in Canada to practise medicine,' and that was it. It was unconditional. Because Canada was the country that provided a home for my grandparents when they had difficulties during the war, this is where they settled.... This is the country that gave them everything that they had, made them what they are, made my parents what they are, and made me what I am."But Canada wouldn't have him. Three times he tried to get into an Ontario medical school. He was short-listed twice. But he never made the cut.So when Kinkartz was eating dinner that night in June, and heard the dean of medicine at the highly rated Michigan State University welcoming him to the class of 2006 on his answering machine, he was more angry than anything else. Ontario medical schools are fiercely competitive. On Tuesday, the Ontario University Application Centre in Guelph will go bananas as it does every year when last-minute applications flood in by car, by mail, or on foot, adding to the piles sent in by thousands of young Canadians who hope and pray that they will somehow stand out. Dr. Jason Murdoch, who sat as a student representative on McMaster's admissions committee three years in a row, is an expert at finding the candidates who shine. He marked their essays, and sat in their interviews, asking questions, like "How do you manage your time effectively?" and "If you don't get into medicine, what are you going to do?""I liked doing the interviews because I remember being so nervous and so I understood and tried to make it the least stressful as possible," Murdoch said. He remembers driving from Burlington to Guelph five years ago, dodging dozens of courier vans to drop off his envelope amidst the end-of-day chaos. He even saw a father screaming at his young daughter, tears running down her cheeks, to complete an application - a document that, if done well, takes months to complete. Like Kinkartz, Murdoch applied three times before he was accepted. Now 33 and a chief resident at St. Joseph's Hospital in London, Ont., he will next year be a full-fledged family doctor. He first applied to med school in 1994, a year after the province slashed enrolment to 532 first-year spots to reduce the number of doctors and save money. But amid reports of Ontario's worsening doctor shortage (the Ontario Medical Association estimates that about 900,000 are without a family physician), the government increased medical school spots to 692. Those new spots don't help the odds much. This year, about 1,700 students competed for 198 spots at the University of Toronto; over 3,000 vied for 138 places at McMaster, and about 1,700 applied to the University of Western Ontario where there is room for 133. All applicants fill out a common application that goes to each university, but each school has its own requirements, based on grade point average, personal qualities and experience. U of T and Western also look at MCAT (Medical College Admission Test) scores. All schools interview a shortlist (between about 400 to 500 applicants) - even U of T, which did not do so until about eight years ago, says Dr. Maureen Shandling, the medical school's director of admissions and awards. "We used to just look at marks and assume they were okay and bring people in," she said. "It's in fact the rest of the file that's the difference. It's all the other accomplishments and things that these people have done in addition to doing well in an interview, and I think that's what makes it tougher." Still, Shandling says academics are weighted a little above 50 per cent, and that while she spends the bulk of her time assessing an individual's traits and experience, marks are still the most critical piece of information. "Everything we know tells us that the thing that tells us best who's going to get through med school is their undergrad grades." At U of T, that means a minimum grade point average of 3.6 on a 4.0 scale, although candidates have been turned away with a 3.8. After applicants are interviewed at McMaster - a school which prides itself on self-motivated learning in small groups - the admission committee watches candidates in a facilitated group tutorial through a one-way mirror. Typically, the group discusses an ethical scenario. For example: a dentist in the local community decides he won't provide dental care to any HIV-positive patients. The committee listens for the content and the quality of the group dynamics during the discussion. Both are important, Murdoch says. "I asked a question once to a candidate and he rambled on for eight minutes, and that's with me trying to interrupt him so we could ask him more questions," Murdoch remembers. "When you're learning in a group and this person is going to share something they've learned, are the other group members going to get a little upset if this person is going on for 15 minutes?" Dr. Claude Nahmias, the chair of admissions at McMaster, says he searches for people who hunger to learn, because the good physicians are the ones who strive to keep up with the latest advances. "If an applicant has gone straight through school, straight through university and has not done the sorts of things that young people do nowadays, like spending a summer in South America, or spending a term in India - or have not been involved in their community, or have not been advocates, or have not spent a summer being camp leaders for disadvantaged kids - all these things do come into play," Nahmias said. "Because it's such a long road to become a doctor, the only way to assess that (commitment) in somebody is looking at whether they have been committed in their lives." Jason Kinkartz will, in four years time, be an American medical school graduate, and one who will likely live in the United States. He says he's still "stupid enough" to consider a residency in Canada, where, upon returning, he'll have to write two qualifying exams. Kinkartz knows the connections he'll make in Michigan over the next four years, both personally and professionally, will probably keep him there, not to mention that paying off his sizeable debts ($400,000) will be far easier in American dollars, he says.In August, the Kinkartz family, as well as one of Jason's close childhood friends, drove down to Lansing, Mich., for MSU's "white coat ceremony" - an American medical school tradition - for the class of 2006. Kinkartz, along with 113 other first-year medical students, processed into a great hall, and donned his first white coat. His journey to becoming a doctor - one who will likely practise in the United States - had begun.
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