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Below, is The Chronicle of a December Applicant:
I never anticipated applying for the 2008 cycle. One year ago this summer, I was on top of the world. I had just finished an amazing junior year, got excellent grades, and started an honors research project. I finally got offered a columnist spot on the Michigan Daily newspaper. I had just received my basic EMT license and was pumped to do EMT-Specialist training in the fall. I was so optimistic that I even added a bio minor on top of my English and biopsych majors.
And, of course, I was very much in love. My plan was to take the MCAT in September, have an unbelievable senior year, and then apply to med school while working as an EMT and staying in town until my girlfriend finished college. I wanted to marry this girl - wow, was I happy!
Well, as my people say: \'man plans, God laughs.\'
On October 26, a week after getting my MCAT scores back, my girlfriend called and broke up with me. She lived just across the street, too. She said that she didn\'t love me anymore, hadn\'t for a least a month, but was waiting until after midterms to tell me.
So, with my years of plans gone, I got really depressed. Though I didn\'t realize it, I turned into a total zombie - friends would stop me on campus and give me a hug for seemingly no reason. I learned after the fact how worried they all were about me. Probably with good reason.
By Thanksgiving break, I was at my parent?s house in Florida, 20 pounds lighter from not eating and hopelessly behind on my work. Then, around 9pm, I got an email from University of Illinois\'s MD/PhD program, advertising a December deadline. I hadn\'t even considered applying to medical school this year, and I had no clue admissions was still open. I never saw the AMCAS before that night, but by 5am the next morning, I had everything finished except for the personal statement.
Newly invigorated with energy, and with only a few days left before the December 1 deadline, I returned to school in Michigan and began drafting the personal statement. There were about 20 schools with December 1 deadlines remaining, so I added all of them with minimal research and submitted the AMCAS on Dec 1, 2007 at 10pm. I spent the next two weeks running around campus collecting letters of recommendation, since I didn\'t have any.
Thankfully, I had made a good name for myself at Michigan, and by December 15, I had 6 LOR\'s on file and mailed along with most of the secondary applications (FedEx - everything was FedEx). I finished the remaining secondaries over winter break and sent in the Osteopathic primary application. How I got all of this done with 18 credits and EMT-training, I will never know. Somehow I rose up against the tide and did well in all my classes despite being behind. Even my columns turned out pretty darn good.
By February, I was standing in front of the Vietnam Memorial in DC. I remember being in a bit of a daze - I looked at my reflection and considered that in the span of a few weeks I interviewed at Touro-CA and George Washington, having never before seen the west coast or ever thinking I would get this far. I even interviewed at Yale, with an extension. And I still had more interviews waiting.
On February 29, three months after deciding to apply, I got my first acceptance to Touro-CA. I was waitlisted at George Washington. On April 17, I interviewed at New York Medical College. On April 24, two days before graduation, I was back in New York interviewing for Technion, an Israeli school. By mid-June, I received letters of acceptance from both.
Ultimately, I was offered 5 MD interviews and 2 DO interviews, but did not attend all of them after getting my first acceptance. I did it all with a 3.4 GPA, a 3.3 science GPA, and a 30 MCAT. I graduated having accomplished everything I set out to do, and recently got back on my feet and began dating again. I\'ll be starting at NYMC, going for the MD/MPH, in a little more than a month.
My story is improbable for sure. And in many ways I wasn\'t a typical science student. But I want all of you to know that anything is possible if you really do try. You can get knocked down and, if you want it enough, find a way a to win, even with all the odds against you.
We help students become doctors. TM
