He Feels Lucky to Have Attended Medical School in Ireland

He Feels Lucky to Have Attended Medical School in Ireland

Going overseas allows visitors to have adventures and experience new and exciting cultures.

Going overseas to attend medical school can be risky, sometimes making it tougher for students to find a residency spot in the U.S. when they finish their studies.

Robert Liddell, MD, experienced nothing but positives when he went abroad for medical school at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland from 1995 to 2000. But studying overseas wasn’t in his plans after he earned a bachelor’s in psychology at Middlebury College in Vermont. 

“I really didn’t know what I wanted to do,” said Dr. Liddell, who’s on the ABR’s Angoff Committee for the Interventional Radiology Certifying Exam. “I thought medicine was something I wanted to do, but I also thought about something in a scientific field.” 

Robert Liddell, MD
Robert Liddell, MD

Dr. Liddell’s journey to Ireland picked up speed when he worked in a research lab with an interventional radiologist at Stanford. The job firmed up his interest in attending medical school, so he decided to stay at Stanford and pursue a master’s in biological sciences. 

“I hadn’t taken all the prerequisites to go to medical school,” he said. “I thought I would finish that year (working in the lab) at Stanford and then do a postbaccalaureate program to finish the things that I needed to do.” 

He kept working at the lab and earned his master’s in 1995. While there, he met a clinical fellow from Ireland who was doing advanced training at Stanford. 

“He said, ‘I know you’re applying to medical schools here in the States, but I had a number of American classmates who came from the U.S., went to medical school in Ireland, and went back to the U.S. and have done very well,’” Dr. Liddell said. 

Facing a competitive field of potential medical school students in America, he took his colleague’s advice and applied overseas. 

“I decided at that point, well, I’ll take this leap,” Dr. Liddell said. “I’ll go abroad and do the first year, and if I like it, maybe I’ll stay. If I don’t, I’ll apply to transfer or reapply to medical schools here in the U.S.” 

He was accepted at the Royal College of Surgeons, where he found that other Americans had the same idea. Of the approximately 250 students in his class, 40 were from the U.S. He estimated that half of his colleagues came from overseas. 

It made for an interesting mix. Foreign students usually are the elders in the cohort. In Ireland, high-achieving students can go directly from high school to medical school. 

“I had a number of classmates who were pretty young,” Dr. Liddell said. “They were all 18, 19, 20 years old, whereas most of us (foreign students) were in our mid- to late-20s. Life was very different for them.” 

It didn’t take long for Dr. Liddell to feel welcomed in Ireland. The week before he left, his mother gave him contact information for relatives who lived in Cork, which is 160 miles south of Dublin. He figured he would settle in and contact his kin in a couple of months. But the relatives couldn’t wait. As these were pre-cell phone days, he found a note on the department bulletin board asking him to contact his relatives. 

“Within a month of landing in Dublin, I was down in Cork,” Dr. Liddell said. “They rolled out the red carpet. I met all the extended relatives, and they were saying, ‘When are you coming back? We’re coming to Dublin to see you.’” 

He also quickly made friends on campus. Foreign students often stayed in a dorm for their first year, enabling Dr. Liddell to get to know his colleagues better. His love of soccer and golf helped him fit in well with Irish students. He and his American colleagues often faced off against their European counterparts in Ryder Cup-style matches. 

The pub culture helped, too. Dublin has more than 750 of them. 

“We would go out as a group together socially,” said Dr. Liddell. “There’s a pub around the corner from the medical school. On Fridays, we’d often have anatomy exams or things that we’d have to finish up and we’d say, ‘I’ll just meet you at the Swan.’ And you’d go and meet up with your friends, and then from there you’d have a plan to either go out to dinner or do whatever you’re going to do.” 

In his third year, his comfort zone expanded when he married the girlfriend he had met at Stanford. 

“She came to Dublin and joined me and got her MBA at Trinity (College),” he said. “Once she finished her MBA, because I had an Irish passport and we eventually got married, she could stay in Dublin and work without a visa or anything.” 

Going to Europe for medical school wasn’t a hindrance to getting back to the U.S. Dr. Liddell landed a residency spot and performed a fellowship at Johns Hopkins, where he’s now an assistant professor of radiology and surgery and director of interventional radiology. 

When studying overseas comes up in conversations, people are curious and impressed. 

“When people see that I went to medical school abroad, they often will say, ‘Wow, going to medical school in Dublin must’ve been cool,’” he said. “Honestly, it was tremendous. It was fun and I learned a lot.”

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