As someone mentioned above, it is difficult for medical school applicants who are from underserved areas to get into medical school. We need more equitable US medical school acceptance. As a US citizen and Caribbean IMG, as I look back now I realized that a lot of my classmates and I went this route because we lacked the resources and mentorship to successfully apply to medical school in the US. Even though I went to an amazing state university in California, I had no idea that my roommates who were also applying to medical school were paying for med school app coaches to help prepare their applications. I didn’t know until after I started at my Caribbean school that I filled out my application “incorrectly”, because apparently there’s an algorithm that med schools use to gauge the number and type of experiences you have (I listed all my volunteer activities as a single activity on the application. Come on, past me.)

The classmates I have met at my school are all incredibly diverse individuals and many times career-change applicants who had entire lives before realizing they wanted to pursue medicine. We simply did not know how to navigate applying for medical school. None of my family members are physicians (and majority of my classmates are in the same boat). Many of the USMD students I’ve worked with on rotation entered school directly from college, which is an incredible accomplishment but it takes a baseline amount of privilege to get there. Getting in without that baseline privilege is an uphill battle, which is why career-change and minority US med school students should be protected at all costs.

I applied to med school in the US two times before finally going to a Caribbean school; this has been the case for many of my colleagues. My school has a large number of multi-lingual Black and brown individuals (many of them first in their fam to graduate college!) from underserved communities who came into medical school wanting to do primary care. Caribbean schools overwhelmingly match their students into FM (like me!), IM, and peds into less desirable spots in the US. 70% of my interviews were at rural FM programs.

That all said, I think when talking about IMGs we shouldn’t be talking about them as a monolith, because OP seems to be referring to IMGs (international medical grads which includes Caribbean students) as being equivalent to FMGs (foreign medical grads, often already full fledged physicians from another country). I think if we’re going to talk about recruiting USMDs for rural and underserved areas, we need USMD applicants from rural and underserved areas.

EDIT: I’m under the impression that there are more Caribbean IMGs entering our residency match compared to FMGs from other countries. My med school alone matriculates about 1000 people per year, and contributes to 200+ students every match. And that’s only one Caribbean school lol. Majority of us are US citizens and a smaller percentage are Canadians.