You have access to your professors inside and outside the classroom.

Typically, a Caribbean medical school is not a giant research university where you’re just a name in a huge database of students, employees, and buildings. Your professors are doctors at the top of their fields, but regard teaching as more than a day job. That means you have more opportunities to interact with them one-on-one and assist them with their research projects than you might elsewhere.

You wear white after Labor Day.

You’re a free spirit anyway, but even if you weren’t, your campus is in a place where dressing in black and gray is not cool, and cynicism is not the default outlook. Besides, whoever made up that rule about the color of your belt matching the color of your shoes was way too uptight.

You’re free of the distractions that go along with living in a large American city or a college town in the sticks.

As you sit in your room trying to study for midterms, are you frequently interrupted by sirens, jackhammers, and angry commuters pushing each other out of the way for a premium strip of sidewalk? Nope, and as you’re trying to form a study group for a really difficult exam, does everyone you try to recruit just blather on about how it’s Cinco de Mayo at the Rathskellar and “everyone’s gonna be there”? Not on your island.

You question whether Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is even a real thing.

Just look out the window. Actually you’re probably behind your building, on a sparsely populated beach, studying under a palm tree or taking a short break by wading through crystal clear waters. Time to sell your SAD lamp on eBay and donate your sweater collection to Goodwill.

You dream of serving your community once you return with MD in hand.

The world has plenty of dermatologists. The world has plenty of plastic surgeons. No offense to either of those specialties, but what the world has fewer and fewer of are primary doctors. Doctors who want to go back to the places where they grew up, to make a real difference, are in increasingly short supply, and meeting this demand is one area where Caribbean medical schools lead the way.