Application season has hit once again, and I'm having people ask me left and right for tips on filling out the application. Though from the applicants' perspective I remember it seeming quite overwhelming and complicated, it seems remarkably straight-forward from the other side. A lot of what I say comes directly from the help manuals, just phrased differently.
Perhaps the best advice I can give is to keep it real. Certainly be proud of what you've done and show it in your descriptions, but playing it up to "sound impressive" will just look foolish. Cut the fluff, because after reading 1000s of applications, reviewers will see straight through the crap. Remember that prestige is not a criterion, nor is the number of spots you fill up in the application system. Secondly, be mindful of what you're being asked to do. Describe your experiences to give the reader a picture of who you are, what you've done, and why you have the qualities that are important in a doctor. It is not a place to reflect on how it has changed your life or strengthened your desire to pursue a career in medicine (unless it's a University of Calgary impact statement). Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, stop comparing yourself to other people. There will always be someone else better in category A, someone else better in category B, or someone else who's just better than you in all categories. What matters more, I think, is that you are not just a copy of someone else but your own unique person. Find that identity and grasp onto it, because you will need it for your sanity, self-confidence, and for personal questions in the interview.
Long story short, unless you know someone who is directly familiar with the admissions process, no one can tell you what your chances are for sure. Every year, many impressive people get rejected without an interview. Every year, many people with comparatively little qualifications get interviewed. There is a lot of hearsay and supposed "factual data" about what gives you a better chance of getting in, but criteria changes every year. Just because someone has gotten in, it does not mean he/she is an expert on the admissions process. Beyond cutoffs for GPA, cutoffs for MCAT scores, and published formulas, your fate is more or less in the hands of who is scoring your application. (Is this supposed to be comforting or disturbing?) Of course, absorbing all I've written is easier said than done. And perhaps I'm wrong, so maybe you shouldn't listen to me.
I remember how my emotions oscillated like a sine wave, rebounding between optimism and disheartened defeat. If you've decided at some point to apply this year, just do it or you will regret it later. Keep your chin up, and keep doing what you enjoy. The worst thing you can do is put all your eggs in one basket and bank on this one application cycle. You will need a healthy dose of distraction while you play the admissions game, and you'll have things to bolster your next application should it come to that. You can start thinking about interviews if you want, but it's probably too early for that. I firmly believe that too much preparation is a hindrance. Instead, familiarize yourself with the Canadian health care system and hot topics about the medical system - public vs. private systems, shortages of doctors in rural areas, health care access for refugees, payment and patient allocation systems for doctors (i.e., fee-for-service, rosters), multidisciplinary health care centres, stem cell research, and general medical ethics to name a few. By no means will you be expected to know about any of them in depth or know about all of them, but being aware is a good thing.
In contrast to the mad scramble for applicants, things have been extremely slow on the Class of 2016 side. There were a few forms to fill out and immunizations to take care of, both of which were very simple and easy to complete. Course registration was remarkably anti-climactic - I literally clicked a single button and all of my courses were added for me. I am anticipating the start of classes, but not having anything to prepare for it makes me restless.
I'm also feeling a sense of nervous anxiety, similar to how I felt entering university. I don't really know anyone in the program, meaning I will be introducing myself to my 280-or-so classmates for the first time. Many people will disagree, but first impressions are extremely important and have considerable power over what niche you will occupy for the remainder of the program. For example, in undergrad, the friends I made in Frosh Week really were the friends I grew close to and stuck with. People who rubbed each other the wrong way tended not to mix even as time smoothed things over. I will not re-invent myself or pretend I'm someone that I'm not. However, I do confess to nervous anticipation about meeting my future colleagues. Maybe, despite all my preaching, I still feel intimidated and assume everyone else is a ridiculously accomplished superstar?
Other than that, there is nothing further to report. It's hard to believe that the medical school journey will begin in just over a month, which is so close, yet so far. The waiting game continues!
Monday, 16 July 2012
Friday, 8 June 2012
This is my story.
Hello internet readers. I don't know what brought you to my blog, but congratulations, you are currently reading the first paragraph of the first post on this blog. I've been seeing medical student blogs pop up over time to help cope with the stress of the admissions process, and I decided to hop on the bandwagon... after I got in, late to the party. You know that feeling you get when you try to look back and remember things from high school or undergrad, but the details are all fuzzy? (I know what you're thinking, but no, it's not alcohol.) This is my attempt at preserving my thoughts and emotions through medical school, so I can look back and laugh at how immature I was in 2012.
So, what's my story? I haven't always wanted to be a doctor, and I'll admit I still don't know of it is 100% the right path for me. Nothing is ever certain, and perceptions are almost always different from reality. Contrary to what some people insist, it's impossible to know what it's really like to be a physician until you actually become one. I compare it to ordering something off the menu in a restaurant. You can read the description and look at pictures to imagine what it's like, and maybe you can smell it if the table next to yours orders that particular dish. Your friends can rave to you all they want about how good it is and how you have to try it. But until you order it and taste it for yourself, you can't be sure if you'll like it or not. (Did I just compare the field of medicine to a burger or a steak?)
So how did I end up here, anyway? True, I am of Asian descent, so it's always been a "good thing" for me to pursue a profession. True, I studied a science that's very closely related to medicine. However, I've never had much pressure to pursue a particular career path. Every single family member I know well is in a non-science field - business, accounting, law, education, that sort of thing. In that sense, I am the rebel venturing into unknown territory, and medical school was never an expectation. As such, I've had many career aspirations growing up, everything from teacher, professor, or research scientist to musician or pastry chef. Coming out of high school, my life's goal was to become a pharmacist - the University of Toronto accepts people into its Faculty of Pharmacy right out of first year, and after four more years I could be working a stable, well-paying job.
This is an example of where I look back and roll my eyes at my immaturity back then. Job stability and salary are important practical considerations but by no means the most important aspects of a career. Prior to that, I never held a "real job". I worked my first "real job" as a cashier at a Shoppers Drug Mart during the summer after 1st year. Even though I didn't do anything in the pharmacy, I got to see what went on in the pharmacy every day that I worked. I'm pretty sure I'd have done alright as a pharmacist and that I'd be pretty happy if I did go down that path, but I got that gut feeling that it wasn't quite right for me. I saw myself wanting to change careers after a few years. So, ironically, I decided that pharmacy was not the right path for me when I got my acceptance letter. Because I'm stupid and stubborn in insisting that it's not right to use it as a backup and take that spot from someone else who really does want to be a pharmacist, I turned down the offer. (And I hope the person that took my spot is doing great things with his/her BPharm!)
In some ways I regretted that decision because it threw me back into the world of uncertainty. However, I embraced the freedom to choose whatever major I wanted and whatever extracurricular activities I was interested in. I secured my first research opportunity and actually enjoyed it very much. I considered the possibility of doing a MSc, PhD, few postdocs, and becoming a professor one day. What further encouraged me was the general atmosphere of my undergraduate program. Most students were pretty gung-ho about research, and only a small handful wanted to pursue an MD. The professors were also very pro-research, touting academia several times in many courses.
Strangely, there was also a lot of hostility towards the idea of medical school. Classmates scorned at the idea of medical school: "Doctors don't know anything, scientists are so much better." Graduate students in the lab interrogated me before being nice to me: "Why do you want to do research, is it because you want to do medical school and put something impressive on your resume?" Professors made subtle remarks about health professionals: "So who here wants to go to medical school? Dental school? Health professionals are, uh, an interesting bunch." Even those that I thought were supportive said strange things: "You got into your backup graduate school program? Good for you! By the way, you don't have to get an MD to do clinical things. Maybe as time goes on you'll realize you don't even want to do medical school."
I think I've always been in denial about my interest in medicine, and given the environment I just described, it's not at all surprising. I also found the idea of medical school to be intimidating. Those peers that DID want to become doctors had those perfect GPAs, were presidents of all these clubs, had so much volunteer experience, had their names on research publications, were involved in sports, and did just about everything. I had very little in comparison. The idea of rejection is very intimidating to someone that hasn't experienced that kind of pressure in a long time. I've always chosen courses and activities according to what I was good at, so I was used to some degree of certainty and success. I felt that applying to medical school was a sure-fire (and expensive and time-consuming and stressful) way to ask for failure, so I chose not to consider it for the longest time.
The summer before my last year of undergrad, I decided to apply anyway and see where it took me. It was beginning to hit me that I was graduating soon, and I didn't want to be stuck after graduation wishing that I had applied. I lucked out and secured a last-minute MCAT seat (had a grand total of 2 whole weeks to study!), wrote it, sent rushed applications to 3 schools, and dove into my 4th year of undergrad with low hopes. It's scary (though funny now that I'm past it) how many rumours and ridiculous hearsay "facts" there are about medical school. I had no idea what to believe, how to word my applications, what to include, what not to include, and what admissions committees looked for. Most of all, I felt totally incompetent reading the PM101 forums and watching people lament about their "low 3.85 OMSAS GPA". People asked how their extracurricular profiles looked, and despite a gazillion hours of volunteering, sports, and music, others said that they were average at best.
To my great surprise, I got TWO interviews out of a total possible 3, even after getting a measly "M" on the MCAT writing section. At this point I realized that maybe you don't have to save the world or cure cancer to get into medical school after all. It was at this point that I probably made the most effort to find out about the profession. What do you learn in medical school? What is it like after you graduate? What kind of people are right for the profession? I'd have done fine as a pharmacist, and I'm sure I'd have been happy in research as well. But the more I read about medicine, the more I wanted to be a part of it. What exactly I found appealing is a complicated topic that deserves a post of its own sometime.
Just like the application process, I was very confused about the interviews. There is so much conflicting information about the Multiple Mini Interview (MMI) process. How should you answer? What points do interviewers look for? How long should you talk? Unfortunately, since I was so ridiculously busy with school work, I had almost no time to prepare and crammed "prep materials" I found online the weekend before. Walking into it, I was so mixed up about what was right, what was wrong, what I should say, and what I should not say. Nerves didn't help either. I was a jumbled, incoherent mess that said a lot of things but in the end said nothing. I totally bombed it.
While I was pretty sure I did poorly on the MMI, I was semi-confident about my personal interview. I didn't end up applying to graduate school because I was optimistic, and I was so busy with school that I didn't care to write a statement of interest at the time. (Words of advice: DON'T take six courses in your final year, ESPECIALLY if you are doing an undergraduate thesis.) A few days before the results were to be released, the anticipation became overwhelming, and I took a short trip to New York with friends. On May 5, 2011, I checked my e-mail in the hotel in New York. I didn't get into either medical school.
It was exactly what I was afraid of - being so optimistic and hopeful for so long, only to have it all crushed with a couple of e-mails. The week afterwards was especially confusing. I wanted to try again, but maybe this was a sign that you really did need to save the world and cure cancer to get past the interview. I wanted to try again, but that would mean I couldn't start anything substantial because I'd have less than a year to do it (if I was to get in the following year). Should I look for work? Should I put in an application for graduate school? Do I stay in my current city or do I move back home?
The feedback scores I got from the MMI school were very low - I was below average for both academics AND non-academics. I thought I did well on the personal interview, but obviously that wasn't enough. Maybe I should just give up after all? One small gesture nudged me towards re-applying. The medical student that interviewed me (as part of the panel) in the personal interview is friends with someone I took a tennis class with, and she had a messaged passed on to me. She said that if it were up to her, she'd have accepted me into the MD Class of 2015, and that if I was passionate about getting in, I should try again. There were no specifics given, and I never saw/spoke to her again after the interview, but the fact she even thought to pass on that message told me that I was doing SOMETHING right.
And so began my "gap year", during which I didn't go to school and didn't find full-time work. (I confess, I tried looking for relevant work but couldn't find a company that would even interview me.) After 3 long months of zero response from countless relevant job postings, I turned to the alternative options. I applied to a tutoring centre for high school students, and I got hired very quickly because I could teach everything. I settled in pretty fast and I really love what I do. I'm not only keeping my mind fresh and nimble, but I'm learning a lot about how to deal effectively with different personality types, how to maintain relationships with clients, how to follow-up on continuous issues, and how to cope with the frustration when someone wants your help but doesn't listen to your advice (then comes back to you about that same problem later). The part-time nature of the work gave me more time to focus on my applications and to apply to graduate school as a plan B.
No more crap this time about what's right, what's wrong, and how I should do it. Just follow the frickin' directions, cut the fluff, and send it off. It's interesting how this different approach can alter your perception of yourself. Who cares if I don't fill out all 48 spots on the OMSAS application? Does it matter that don't have publications even though I had 3 research experiences? So what if all those applicants are club execs? I've had great experiences too that are much more meaningful to me, even if they may sound less impressive. I may not have as much as some applicants, but I'm proud of what I have accomplished, and I have no regrets about anything that I did. I did join an MMI prep group over Skype to just practice speaking, discuss ideas, gain new perspectives, and get feedback on my organization of thoughts. But come the real thing, I chose to just answer as I'd normally answer, as if someone on the street was interviewing me. It was a gamble, since I didn't know if interviewers expected a certain style or specific content in the responses (like the MCAT writing section), but I didn't want to sound like every other interviewee.
This year, I got 4 interviews, and I was much more optimistic than last year. I got into my graduate program of choice, so I had a great backup plan in place even if it medical school didn't work out. So in that sense, I was a bit more sane, but the anticipation leading up to May 15th was so much worse. I don't know how I'd have felt or how I'd have reacted if I got rejected from all 4 medical schools that interviewed me this year. However, that doesn't matter anymore, because one school took me, and that's all I needed. It does puzzle me why I got into UBC and not the others, since I thought I did better at some of the other interviews. But whatever admissions is actually looking for and whatever I did "right" or "wrong", I am just glad that I don't have to go through the process again. I expected my primary emotions at the news would be excitement and happiness, but my greatest feeling was relief. There is finally some certainty in my career path, and now I can focus on the meat and potatoes of what's to come rather than which path I'm going to take.
Many people, especially students aiming for medical school, consider medical students to be demi-gods that are a cut above normal humans. However, I'm still the same person as I ever was. It's true that there is this ridiculously intense selection process, but I'm not any more extraordinary or impressive than I was on May 14th. I just happened to be chosen. It's great to feel proud of getting in, and I am proud of my achievements, but I think it's important to keep myself grounded and aware that it's just the beginning. There are many more hurdles ahead to clear (such as CaRMS), and I hope to keep writing about them as they come.
Thanks for reading, and I promise the next entry won't be as long.
So, what's my story? I haven't always wanted to be a doctor, and I'll admit I still don't know of it is 100% the right path for me. Nothing is ever certain, and perceptions are almost always different from reality. Contrary to what some people insist, it's impossible to know what it's really like to be a physician until you actually become one. I compare it to ordering something off the menu in a restaurant. You can read the description and look at pictures to imagine what it's like, and maybe you can smell it if the table next to yours orders that particular dish. Your friends can rave to you all they want about how good it is and how you have to try it. But until you order it and taste it for yourself, you can't be sure if you'll like it or not. (Did I just compare the field of medicine to a burger or a steak?)
So how did I end up here, anyway? True, I am of Asian descent, so it's always been a "good thing" for me to pursue a profession. True, I studied a science that's very closely related to medicine. However, I've never had much pressure to pursue a particular career path. Every single family member I know well is in a non-science field - business, accounting, law, education, that sort of thing. In that sense, I am the rebel venturing into unknown territory, and medical school was never an expectation. As such, I've had many career aspirations growing up, everything from teacher, professor, or research scientist to musician or pastry chef. Coming out of high school, my life's goal was to become a pharmacist - the University of Toronto accepts people into its Faculty of Pharmacy right out of first year, and after four more years I could be working a stable, well-paying job.
This is an example of where I look back and roll my eyes at my immaturity back then. Job stability and salary are important practical considerations but by no means the most important aspects of a career. Prior to that, I never held a "real job". I worked my first "real job" as a cashier at a Shoppers Drug Mart during the summer after 1st year. Even though I didn't do anything in the pharmacy, I got to see what went on in the pharmacy every day that I worked. I'm pretty sure I'd have done alright as a pharmacist and that I'd be pretty happy if I did go down that path, but I got that gut feeling that it wasn't quite right for me. I saw myself wanting to change careers after a few years. So, ironically, I decided that pharmacy was not the right path for me when I got my acceptance letter. Because I'm stupid and stubborn in insisting that it's not right to use it as a backup and take that spot from someone else who really does want to be a pharmacist, I turned down the offer. (And I hope the person that took my spot is doing great things with his/her BPharm!)
In some ways I regretted that decision because it threw me back into the world of uncertainty. However, I embraced the freedom to choose whatever major I wanted and whatever extracurricular activities I was interested in. I secured my first research opportunity and actually enjoyed it very much. I considered the possibility of doing a MSc, PhD, few postdocs, and becoming a professor one day. What further encouraged me was the general atmosphere of my undergraduate program. Most students were pretty gung-ho about research, and only a small handful wanted to pursue an MD. The professors were also very pro-research, touting academia several times in many courses.
Strangely, there was also a lot of hostility towards the idea of medical school. Classmates scorned at the idea of medical school: "Doctors don't know anything, scientists are so much better." Graduate students in the lab interrogated me before being nice to me: "Why do you want to do research, is it because you want to do medical school and put something impressive on your resume?" Professors made subtle remarks about health professionals: "So who here wants to go to medical school? Dental school? Health professionals are, uh, an interesting bunch." Even those that I thought were supportive said strange things: "You got into your backup graduate school program? Good for you! By the way, you don't have to get an MD to do clinical things. Maybe as time goes on you'll realize you don't even want to do medical school."
I think I've always been in denial about my interest in medicine, and given the environment I just described, it's not at all surprising. I also found the idea of medical school to be intimidating. Those peers that DID want to become doctors had those perfect GPAs, were presidents of all these clubs, had so much volunteer experience, had their names on research publications, were involved in sports, and did just about everything. I had very little in comparison. The idea of rejection is very intimidating to someone that hasn't experienced that kind of pressure in a long time. I've always chosen courses and activities according to what I was good at, so I was used to some degree of certainty and success. I felt that applying to medical school was a sure-fire (and expensive and time-consuming and stressful) way to ask for failure, so I chose not to consider it for the longest time.
The summer before my last year of undergrad, I decided to apply anyway and see where it took me. It was beginning to hit me that I was graduating soon, and I didn't want to be stuck after graduation wishing that I had applied. I lucked out and secured a last-minute MCAT seat (had a grand total of 2 whole weeks to study!), wrote it, sent rushed applications to 3 schools, and dove into my 4th year of undergrad with low hopes. It's scary (though funny now that I'm past it) how many rumours and ridiculous hearsay "facts" there are about medical school. I had no idea what to believe, how to word my applications, what to include, what not to include, and what admissions committees looked for. Most of all, I felt totally incompetent reading the PM101 forums and watching people lament about their "low 3.85 OMSAS GPA". People asked how their extracurricular profiles looked, and despite a gazillion hours of volunteering, sports, and music, others said that they were average at best.
To my great surprise, I got TWO interviews out of a total possible 3, even after getting a measly "M" on the MCAT writing section. At this point I realized that maybe you don't have to save the world or cure cancer to get into medical school after all. It was at this point that I probably made the most effort to find out about the profession. What do you learn in medical school? What is it like after you graduate? What kind of people are right for the profession? I'd have done fine as a pharmacist, and I'm sure I'd have been happy in research as well. But the more I read about medicine, the more I wanted to be a part of it. What exactly I found appealing is a complicated topic that deserves a post of its own sometime.
Just like the application process, I was very confused about the interviews. There is so much conflicting information about the Multiple Mini Interview (MMI) process. How should you answer? What points do interviewers look for? How long should you talk? Unfortunately, since I was so ridiculously busy with school work, I had almost no time to prepare and crammed "prep materials" I found online the weekend before. Walking into it, I was so mixed up about what was right, what was wrong, what I should say, and what I should not say. Nerves didn't help either. I was a jumbled, incoherent mess that said a lot of things but in the end said nothing. I totally bombed it.
While I was pretty sure I did poorly on the MMI, I was semi-confident about my personal interview. I didn't end up applying to graduate school because I was optimistic, and I was so busy with school that I didn't care to write a statement of interest at the time. (Words of advice: DON'T take six courses in your final year, ESPECIALLY if you are doing an undergraduate thesis.) A few days before the results were to be released, the anticipation became overwhelming, and I took a short trip to New York with friends. On May 5, 2011, I checked my e-mail in the hotel in New York. I didn't get into either medical school.
It was exactly what I was afraid of - being so optimistic and hopeful for so long, only to have it all crushed with a couple of e-mails. The week afterwards was especially confusing. I wanted to try again, but maybe this was a sign that you really did need to save the world and cure cancer to get past the interview. I wanted to try again, but that would mean I couldn't start anything substantial because I'd have less than a year to do it (if I was to get in the following year). Should I look for work? Should I put in an application for graduate school? Do I stay in my current city or do I move back home?
The feedback scores I got from the MMI school were very low - I was below average for both academics AND non-academics. I thought I did well on the personal interview, but obviously that wasn't enough. Maybe I should just give up after all? One small gesture nudged me towards re-applying. The medical student that interviewed me (as part of the panel) in the personal interview is friends with someone I took a tennis class with, and she had a messaged passed on to me. She said that if it were up to her, she'd have accepted me into the MD Class of 2015, and that if I was passionate about getting in, I should try again. There were no specifics given, and I never saw/spoke to her again after the interview, but the fact she even thought to pass on that message told me that I was doing SOMETHING right.
And so began my "gap year", during which I didn't go to school and didn't find full-time work. (I confess, I tried looking for relevant work but couldn't find a company that would even interview me.) After 3 long months of zero response from countless relevant job postings, I turned to the alternative options. I applied to a tutoring centre for high school students, and I got hired very quickly because I could teach everything. I settled in pretty fast and I really love what I do. I'm not only keeping my mind fresh and nimble, but I'm learning a lot about how to deal effectively with different personality types, how to maintain relationships with clients, how to follow-up on continuous issues, and how to cope with the frustration when someone wants your help but doesn't listen to your advice (then comes back to you about that same problem later). The part-time nature of the work gave me more time to focus on my applications and to apply to graduate school as a plan B.
No more crap this time about what's right, what's wrong, and how I should do it. Just follow the frickin' directions, cut the fluff, and send it off. It's interesting how this different approach can alter your perception of yourself. Who cares if I don't fill out all 48 spots on the OMSAS application? Does it matter that don't have publications even though I had 3 research experiences? So what if all those applicants are club execs? I've had great experiences too that are much more meaningful to me, even if they may sound less impressive. I may not have as much as some applicants, but I'm proud of what I have accomplished, and I have no regrets about anything that I did. I did join an MMI prep group over Skype to just practice speaking, discuss ideas, gain new perspectives, and get feedback on my organization of thoughts. But come the real thing, I chose to just answer as I'd normally answer, as if someone on the street was interviewing me. It was a gamble, since I didn't know if interviewers expected a certain style or specific content in the responses (like the MCAT writing section), but I didn't want to sound like every other interviewee.
This year, I got 4 interviews, and I was much more optimistic than last year. I got into my graduate program of choice, so I had a great backup plan in place even if it medical school didn't work out. So in that sense, I was a bit more sane, but the anticipation leading up to May 15th was so much worse. I don't know how I'd have felt or how I'd have reacted if I got rejected from all 4 medical schools that interviewed me this year. However, that doesn't matter anymore, because one school took me, and that's all I needed. It does puzzle me why I got into UBC and not the others, since I thought I did better at some of the other interviews. But whatever admissions is actually looking for and whatever I did "right" or "wrong", I am just glad that I don't have to go through the process again. I expected my primary emotions at the news would be excitement and happiness, but my greatest feeling was relief. There is finally some certainty in my career path, and now I can focus on the meat and potatoes of what's to come rather than which path I'm going to take.
Many people, especially students aiming for medical school, consider medical students to be demi-gods that are a cut above normal humans. However, I'm still the same person as I ever was. It's true that there is this ridiculously intense selection process, but I'm not any more extraordinary or impressive than I was on May 14th. I just happened to be chosen. It's great to feel proud of getting in, and I am proud of my achievements, but I think it's important to keep myself grounded and aware that it's just the beginning. There are many more hurdles ahead to clear (such as CaRMS), and I hope to keep writing about them as they come.
Thanks for reading, and I promise the next entry won't be as long.
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