Yeeeehaaaaa! Med School Admissions!
If you’ve been stalking me for the past 12 months or so you might have known that I’ve been applying to medical school for the fall of 2005. Yet, since I find precious little e-mail in my inbox detailing my time in the shower that morning or angrily demanding why I spend so much time with that girl from the 4th floor, I’ll fill everyone in.
I took the MCAT’s (the admissions test, sorta like the LSAT’s, GRE’s, etc.) back in August so that I could go to med school. It takes time, precious time for AAMC, the people that run the MCAT’s and the whole basic admissions process for med schools in the US and Canada to run my Scantron sheets through their magical oracles of aptitude of medicine and smartassism. These oracles don’t come cheap and won’t do work on McDonalds, so I paid $200 for the privilege of being ranked and evaluated on the basis of my circle filling abilities.
Which brings us up to mid-October. Actually 4 days past the exact middle of October when the test results were promised, but such is life. Test results in hand, I went about deciding where I wanted to apply to medical school. Hours and hours of thought and deliberation went into this process, hell, I even started an IMHO thread on the topic! I came up with my list of five. Of these, the admission deadlines were past for three. Back to the AAMC webpage to use their search feature to figure out who has deadlines that I actually haven’t passed by yet. From these efforts I have now delivered the true, holy, and sacred (cue drum roll) List of Five, including Creighton Medical School, John A. Burns Hawaii, University of Florida, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and finally, my first choice, the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.
To apply to any US or Canadian medical schools, you apply online through the AMCAS system. $80 base plus $30/school brings our running tally to $430. Somewhere between my transcript request form, my transcripts office, and AMCAS’s crack team of transcript decoders, my AP scores which are standing in for a lot of my prerequisites never exactly make it into the system. I took another few hours to send out separate transcript requests in-person at the transcript office for transcripts to each of my schools, although this is complicated by the fact that my Psychology Statistics professor mis-bubbled my grade from first semester as an F instead of an A- (heh, whoops, still hasn’t gotten fixed) and I have to make sure that only the AP scores are sent instead of the whole transcript.
Anyway, all of the primary app’s are off, and I just sit-back and pray that any follow ups from schools don’t get deleted by my school e-mail’s filtering software because apparently a large portion of the responses from these medical schools look like spam. I first hear back from Florida who invites me to spend another $100 to electronically submit my secondary application and residency statement. $100, ouch, isn’t that kind of steep compared to other med-school admissions fees? I’ll soon discover that it isn’t, but just to make sure that this money isn’t wasted I give a call to the admissions office back in Florida to ensure that out-of-state residents still have a fighting chance of getting into the school. Although I ask for specifics and details only to be given some excuses about hard numbers, I hang up feeling heartened by the admission person’s promise that, “out of state students are given full and fair consideration in the admissions process.” Two days after I submit my Florida secondary app, I hear back via e-mail.
Apparently, the University of Florida hasn’t admitted anyone from outside of Florida into their medical school for the last three years! Right now, based upon my primary application, they don’t quite feel that I’d be up to snuff for their out of state standards. Toodles! This is the point at which I formulate my simple plan of action for the rest of my life: “Fuck Florida.” You see, I tell my little tale of woe to everyone I know that has the slightest chance of future political success and get them to sing along with me, “Fuck Florida…” The next time they find themselves with a little hurricane clean-up on their hands and come crying to Washington D.C. for Federal Disaster Zone status or whatever I can only hope that one of political allies is in office and can reply with a succinct, “ya’ know what? Fuck Florida.”
Moving on. UNC-Chapel Hill has the same song-and-dance in their rejection letter about accepting only very few out of state students and that many qualified applicants are turned down, we wish you the best in your application odyssey, etc. Oh well, I can handle rejection. At least they didn’t stoop to ask for a secondary application and the associated fee before rejecting me.
In mid-January, I get an e-mail from Creighton congratulating me that, “my file has been completed,” and I should hear back from them for either a no or an interview in late February. That’s bizarre, because all I can hear from Omaha is a giant sucking sound of voidness. To date, I still haven’t heard anything back from them, but given how late it is, I’ll take that for a no. Now I know what’s it’s like to wake up to hear, “I’ll call you next week.” Good thing I only ever went to second base and paid $75 for the secondary app with these shady characters.
John A. Burns Hawaii: $80 for secondary app. When I first started my application odyssey, I presumed that one could interview locally or regionally for medical schools rather than dropping the cash to travel all the way to any given school. I would have figured out this wasn’t the case from their admissions bulletin, but their school servers hosting this information were down due to some severe flooding in Honolulu when I selected JABSOM back in October. I simply didn’t have the time or financial means to interview for this school. So, when I was offered the chance to interview I considered for a while before unfortunately having to withdraw my application. Sad, I was actually very excited about their problem-based curriculum.
University of Colorado Health Sciences Center: Well, I was lucky enough to be offered an interview which I felt went fairly well. $80 fee bringing the total for this adventure to about $765. I was sent away from my interview day with a decent half-eaten sub sandwich in a brown paper bag and the friendly words of their admissions person, “We’ll let you know by the 22nd of March!” The day of judgment has come and gone. When they report to you, you’re either a yes, a no, or on the alternate list. On the alternate list, they won’t tell you your place, but they will tell you if you’re on the top, middle, or bottom third. For the past 15 years, the top has always been offered a spot by the time school actually starts; they’ve dipped into the bottom third exactly once, and as they liked to say, “the middle is where all the actions at.”
And guess what ladies? I am where the action is at.
