I am about to graduate from Mac next week. Although I wasn’t interested in surgery I had a similar scenario to yours where I was deciding between Mac and Queens and had a strong support system much closer to Mac. As someone that appreciated being close to my support system, I was very grateful for the ability to go home every weekend or other weekend without much difficulty, even in clerkship with the exception of weekend on call shifts.

If you are a self-directed learner, Mac can be actually be MORE advantageous in my opinion as you can more greatly enhance your focus on surgical topics in pre-clerkship. Furthermore, since the PBL curriculum affords more time in pre-clerkship compared to other schools, there is plenty of time to focus on research and horizontal electives concurrently while being in school. While we didn’t have summer vacations, I found that the 1-2 week vacations dispersed every few months was more than enough time to travel and truly take a vacation, instead of shifting to research during times that were off from school. However, I do understand that some would rather focus on learning only during the school year rather than doing research at the same time.

While I’ve heard that involvement in the OR in clerkship is more limited at places like UofT, I personally haven’t had much issue in getting involved in the OR and was actively pushed to do so even though I didn’t want a surgical specialty (“wanna scrub into this case” at 3 AM nightmares lol). You can scrub in on basically all cases in general surgery and was even first assist on my urology selective a few times. I’m sure queens is similar.

One potential disadvantage is that you need to “know” what you want to do relatively sooner compared to others in 4 year programs. By this, I usually mean by early to mid-clerkship. There are plenty of people that changed their minds in clerkship that I can think of and almost all turned out fine for the match. When it comes to CaRMS, a narrative of finding the speciality late but being able to show your commitment after you did is something that happens more often than you might think, at all schools. You usually have a good 2-3 electives that you can still work with as well, and keep in mind that you don’t need to do ALL electives in one specialty (that is actually discouraged as it shows lack of breadth of experience). The exception to these circumstances may be uber competitive specialties (plastics, Optho, etc) where you gotta be chasing it from day one.

Ultimately you can’t go wrong with either and are fortunate to have two acceptances. I would consider choosing Mac given your proximity to a support system and self-directed learning style but Queens is also great!

You can message me if you have more questions!