Returning Home

Of everything in the residency process, this is the piece we think gets the least attention relative to how much it matters. A return-of-service agreement is a contract. It trades a training position for years of your working life in a place you may not have picked. We aren’t lawyers and this isn’t legal advice.

One small thing worth knowing first: the Medical Council of Canada’s page now reads “MCCQE (formerly MCCQE Part I).” If you have been searching for “MCCQE Part 1” and finding conflicting information, some of it is simply old. [1] We are keeping the older name in the title, because it is what students still type

When we started looking into how a Canadian who studied in Ireland gets back into the Canadian system, we expected a map. What we found was a set of doors, each with a different lock, and a lot of forum posts describing a door that closed years ago. This is our attempt at a plain

If you search for the match rate for Canadians who study abroad, you will find a lot of confident numbers, and almost none of them come from CaRMS. The reason is simple. CaRMS publishes results for international medical graduates as one group, with no separate line for Canadian citizens and permanent residents who studied abroad.

The CaRMS application for the 2027 match closes on 26 November 2026 at noon Eastern. If you are reading this in mid-October, that is about six weeks away, and some of the steps before it take longer than six weeks to finish. That is the first thing we would want a Canadian studying abroad to

One thing that surprised us when we started learning about personal finance in medicine is how different the financial timeline of a doctor looks compared to almost every other profession. Most people graduate, get a job, and start earning a real income in their early twenties. Doctors don’t. We spend years accumulating debt before we