Fauji Foundation and Shifa are better choices for you living in Islamabad. You should wait it out for their lists. As far as NUMS is concerned, I don't really get the hype around it. Why do people fancy It? I mean why do people think that an institute run by army is naturally better. Well to be honest, I have seen graduates of CMH struggling quite a lot to settle outside CMH when they graduate. During their 5 years, they live in a bubble of uniformed people and an isolated society with a limited network, as soon as they pass out from the college to pursue jobs elsewhere they struggle due to lack of PR, recommendations and networking. Many students of CMH can't settle outside CMH because they live in isolation there. And with its affiliation with NUMS, they have gotten even more isolated. It's not like Army is going to hire them for the rest of their lives. There are limited residency positions in CMH and CMH is under financial constraints since the last 1 year or so, because of which they have even stopped hiring their own graduates for residency positions. The consultants and faculty of CMH is hardly known outside the Army set up and most of their professors in clinical years are uniformed people with no teaching experience. I don't know why people fancy army so much when the graduates will ultimately be working in a civilian set up for the rest of their lives. And being in an army set up kind of puts them at a disadvantage after they graduate because they have no idea how the real life set up where they will eventually end up working is actually like. Most graduates hence struggle after they graduate. Plus clinical experience in a military hospital is generally mediocre. You can't compare it with the likes of Shalamar which has now become a semi government hospital in which 50% cases are totally free and the rest are either insurance cases or cases with absolute nominal government charges. Shalamar is also attached with Fauji Foundation Hospital Lahore which is 100% free. So to be honest, I don't get the hype around NUMS. For a person like me who is now doing residency after graduating, the graduates of NUMS affiliated colleges are clinically weak and mediocre at best. And they generally struggle if they can't make it in PLAB or USMLE which not more than 5 to 6 people in a class do. If they end up doing FCPS here in Pakistan, they struggle. Most of them don't even go into clinical practice. So in all honesty, I don't get the hype at all.
