I love talking to interviewees who visit my school in hopes to attain admission to GW's medical school. It really does serve as a humble reminder of where I started in this long process. It also brings about bad memories of obsessively checking emails for new updates from any of the schools I applied to and of heartaches from the many, many rejection letters as well. Trust me....there were many.
The application process is seriously a crap-shoot in my opinion. You start applying to medical school in the first week of June and have to be "verified" by the online application company. Verified means having every piece of relevant information about your life submitted into the database. This includes transcripts from all the schools that you attended, a personal statement about your interest in medicine, and descriptions about every relevant experience you may have had that you want all the medical schools to know about...just so they can look you up and hopefully find that your love for garage sale shopping is unique and interesting...so much so that they will offer you an interview at their school. Not! No, I'm just kidding. The process then continues up until about May of the following year when you pretty much know whether you received admission anywhere or whether to assess your options for the future i.e. reapply the next cycle, wait a couple years, or re-evaluate if this is really what you want to do.
But, do you see how aweful this can become? As an applicant, you have enough self-esteem to really think that you're good enough and smart enough to get into medical school, but then you receive your first out-right rejection from some school and it really burns you. What...they didn't even want to get to know me? They're just going to reject me without even getting to know?!? What kind of people are they? Don't they know that I have done this and that and this... and the list goes on and on. And the rejections keep flying in. I actually thought about getting a separate mailing address for all these rejection letters because it was so disheartening.
The thing is is that you could be spectacular, but just had bad luck in the process. Someone who may have looked at your file and who saw your love for garage sale shopping (in addition to your passion to help save people's lives) may absolutely hate hand-me-downs. Maybe they grew up being the youngest of 10 children who ALWAYS got the leftovers from the big sibs and despised it their whole lives that once they went on their own, they made it a life long vow to never buy something used EVER AGAIN! I mean...who knows?
So yeah. Talking to applicants really helps remind me of the bad days when I first started in this process, where I prayed every day for some school to look at my file and invite me to their school for an interview just to learn that I am worth the investment. Half the battle is translating your passion and determination on paper and the other half is really proving it. For this reason, I like to talk to applicants and offer some encouragement that medicine is really great once you get in. It is more than anything I expected in a good way and even though it was a tough road to get here, I would do it over again. The thing that makes me sad about this process is how many great individuals who get so disheartened by the rejections and the closed doors, that they re-evaluate and choose another field, even though they could have been excellent physicians. *Insert sad face here*
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