In 2018-’19, 53,371 individuals applied to U.S. and Canadian allopathic medical schools. Just over 21,000 students were admitted. Said another way, around 40-41% earned a spot in medical school. During this same time frame, 21,584 applicants applied for around 7,672 seats in U.S. osteopathic medical schools. About 35% of applicants earned a spot in a medical school. The average U.S. medical school applicant, in 2018-‘19 submitted about 16 applications (MD and DO). This is well over 1 million applications flooding the nations medical schools. What is so special about the 40% or so applicants that are accepted? What about the 60% or so who are not accepted? What happens to these students and why are they not accepted?
I’ve already posted about some of the various requirements that one must meet to get into medical school. I won’t rehash them here but if you would like more information, leave a note and I’ll get back to you. What I will say here is that the process of gaining admissions to medical school is perhaps the most grueling thing that I have ever done. In many ways, I think that it was more grueling than the application process to the Officer Candidate School program with the Oklahoma Army National Guard / Oklahoma Military Academy. We’re talking semester after semester of science classes, some of which are incredibly difficult AND boring depending on your professor (Any reader ever taken General Physics II at Tarrant County Community College Southeast?), hours of community service and volunteer work, clinical work, research work, competing for letters of recommendation in that 450 person Organic Chemistry class where the professor said that he would only write letters for the top 10% of the class, and of course, the monster of an exam, the MCAT. And AFTER you finish all of that, you have to start the primary AMCAS and/or AACOMAS applications to medical school. You’ve got to have the money; it is. not uncommon for students to spend upwards of $5,000 to apply to medical school. Some students have spent more money. Then you have to write the famous (or infamous) personal statement. How do you ensure that you tell your entire life story but make it not sound like every other applicant out there, in 5,300 characters? If you are able to run this gauntlet, maybe, just maybe, you will be one of the fortunate students who earns an interview.
Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), I was one of those students who did not get so much as an interview the first time that I applied to U.S. medical school in 2010. I did not have the money to apply broadly and while I had good letters of recommendation and experiences, my MCAT score and grades were mediocre at best. I also had a lot going on in my personal life at the time. The woman who is now my wife, had gone to school at SIU-Carbondale and our relationship was really on the rocks. I’d been an ass and very nearly lost her. At the time, there was no guarantee that the two of us were going to even stay together. Still, despite all of that, when I got my first rejection emails, I was EMBARRASSED. I felt like I was a complete idiot for not being able to get an admission offer. After reflecting on things, I realized that there are students, many who were FAR better and more worthy of a seat in medical school than I was at that time, who do not get into medical school. It doesn’t make you an idiot not to get in. Medical school is one of the toughest schools to gain admissions to and EVERYONE, well, most everyone, is incredibly smart and talented. Usually, only the crème de la crème are fortunate enough to earn a seat. I discovered that I needed to learn from my failure to gain admission and then prepare myself so that I wouldn’t fail again.
It took a LOT longer than I had anticipated. 10 years have passed since I first applied to U.S. medical schools. Some people must think that I am crazy to put myself through the roller coaster of applying to medical school, especially during this time of COVID-19. You submit your primary applications and then you wait, in my case, for eight weeks, for them to be verified. Then you bite off all of your nails and have to apologize to your wife for leaving finger nail bits at the side of the bed. I couldn’t help it though; I was waiting to see if I would get secondary applications. Just when you think that you aren’t going to get any secondary applications and you start making plans to apply to Caribbean and Australian medical schools, you get that first secondary application. Your mood is immediately buoyed and then you get a second secondary application, a third, a fourth, and next thing you know, you have 17 secondaries in your email inbox!
After you complete secondaries and send them back, you wait for weeks to months to hear back from the schools. If you are lucky, you may get a response in two weeks. If you are unlucky, you may not hear anything from the schools. This cycle, American medical schools have received a record number of applications. It is not uncommon for some students to have not even had their primary applications screened; I am waiting for a small handful of schools to screen my primary application and I have 10 or 11 secondaries out there that have not been screened for an interview. I just heard back from Marian College of Osteopathic Medicine that they have only just now sent my secondary to a faculty member who will screen it; it may be another four weeks before they say something… Anyway, during this whole time, you are going through additional rounds of biting your teeth and deciding if you should drop that $500 deposit to the Caribbean medical school that has admitted you.
Finally, one day, you get a non-descript email that notifies you of an offer to interview. Within fairly short order, you get another email saying the same thing. You are back on that high again! You and your wife run out to DXL to buy a suite and you go through several rounds of mock interviews. Finally, you have your two interviews and at the conclusion, they tell you that you will receive a decision within two to four weeks. You prepare to go through another round of nail biting but no, you are blessed to earn two acceptances in fairly short order within three weeks of one another. You start to realize how fortunate you are that you got into not only one but two US medical schools who are among your top choices. At the same time, you feel heartbroken because you have friends who have been waitlisted (they get to hang out on a list all spring and summer until a seat opens up) or denied even the chance to interview. Sometimes, the process feels like a girlfriend who is playing games with your emotions.
I’m not trying to make it sound like I am whining. Maybe I am whining just a bit. I’m really trying to convey how annoying and aggravating this process can be. For some people, they may have to take multiple MCATs and apply multiple times before they earn a seat in a medical school. Some of these people may be fortunate enough to make it while others will reach a point where they realize that it’s time to do something else. I have a mentee in California who is almost at this point and I don’t know what to say. His personal statement and application is great and he completely remade himself academically. He retook the MCAT and scored a 515; up from a 489, 490, and 496. So far, he’s applied to 42 schools but has only interviewed at one and he is on the waitlist at the one school. Going abroad for medical school is an option but it’s become increasingly difficult to return to the U.S. and successfully match into a residency.
In any case, I hope that this conveys some of the difficulty that is entailed with earning a seat in a U.S. medical school. I am incredibly fortunate to be one of the students who will be starting medical school this fall. If there is anything that I would want you to take away from this, it would be that getting into medical school is not a sprint, it’s a marathon and you should not start this race unless you are fully committed and ready to run it to its conclusion, no matter how long that may take.
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