Financial Readiness for Medical School, Part 1

Why am I making my first substantive blog post about money? When I was in my senior year of undergrad, I had this notion that I wanted to apply to medical school but I hadn’t stopped to consider HOW I would get their financially. When I used to attend the University of Arizona-Phoenix and Midwestern-AZCOM seminars, the student speakers and admissions representatives always talked about the importance of grades, MCATs, shadowing, and extracurricular activities but I do not recall anyone ever discussing the importance of money. If money ever came up, the students would say, “Oh, everyone gets loans so don’t worry about it.”

So, in 2010, my first time applying to medical school, I started with paying $265 for the MCAT and $1499 for the Kaplan face-to-face MCAT class. At the time, I was working a student job on campus making $12/hr and I had to use my financial aid to cover my apartment in downtown Tempe, AZ. My, wife, who at that time, was my fiancé, would send me money from time to time but because she was in a PhD program of her own, she couldn’t afford to send me a great deal of money. I scored a 29 S on the MCAT and prepared to apply to medical school. I discovered that I couldn’t afford the AMCAS or AACOMAS fees so I looked to the fee assistance programs that both application services had. Unfortunately, I did not qualify because my father made too much money. Then there was another issue: I moved away from home when I was 17 and because I had a bad relationship with my step-person, they were not going to give me the tax documents that I would have needed to apply for fee assistance anyway. So, there went my opportunity to apply to medical school…

In a way, I consider myself fortunate that I wasn’t able to apply. I thought that everyone would get the federal subsidized or unsubsidized loans for medical school, just as I had for my undergraduate studies but as I found out, my sub and unsub loans were almost maxed out. To attend medical school, I was going to have to take the federal Graduate Plus loan and it is credit-based. My score at the time was around a 580, some 20 or so points shy of the 600ish FICO score that was needed to qualify for the Grad Plus. A cosigner was out of the question so I was not going to have a choice but to work on repairing my credit. Had I actually gotten into medical school, without some type of scholarship, I was not going to be able to stay in medical school beyond a year or two based on how much sub / unsub loan money that I was eligible for. I was being forced to confront my financial past so that I would actually be able to attend medical school in the future.

Tomorrow, I’ll be back to discuss how I was able to clean my credit up and get financially fit for medical school. I’ll also provide a breakdown of how much it cost me this cycle to apply. You will come away with a real appreciation of how expensive this endeavor is and why financial planning for medical school is as important as academic planning. I’ll conclude with some resources that will be useful to you as you financially plan for medical school.