Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Getting into medical school

Like many people out there I have been trying and trying and trying to get into medical school. The first year that I applied, I didn't get in. Instead of letting this get to me, I decided to work my butt off even harder and do whatever it took to get into medical school. That meant spending an entire summer, when my buddies were out having a good time, studying for the dreaded MCAT once again. But this time, taking the MCAT (for the third freaking time) paid off and I started to hear back from some top osteopathic schools. I interviewed at a few schools (AZCOM, CCOM, NSU-COM, MSUCOM, and TOURO-NY).

From these schools, I got waitlisted at AZCOM, CCOM, NSU-COM, MSUCOM and got accepted to TOURO NY. Since Touro was a brand new school (the campus wasn't even done and the staff wasn't fully hired either) I decided against attending. My first choice was CCOM (since I live across the street) and then NSU-COM (I absolutely LOVED the campus). Now, I know many people are on waitlists and they don't really know what to do to increase their chances of getting in. Here is what I did (and it got me accepted into NSU-COM and eventually my first choice, CCOM).

1) Send letters of intent/interest every 2 weeks to the school. It's important to sound humble, sincere, and passionate about attending the school that you're writing to. You want to show the school that you are extremely interested in their school but you do not want to annoy them. Also, you don't want to repeat the SAME thing in all of your letters.

2) Have more letters of recommendation to be sent in on your behalf. It would be key if you could find people who are linked to the school (i.e. alumni) to write a LOR for you. Some people say that you shouldn't send too many in, but to CCOM I believe I sent in an additional 8 or 9 LORs, hehe so yeah :-)

3) Make sure to update of the admissions committee of ANYTHING positive in your life. Whether it is work-related, school related, or maybe one day you were sitting on a bench people watching and all of a sudden you realized another reason to why you wanted to become a physician. Let the know. It may seem odd to you, but you'll definitely stand out...

Anyways I wanted to start this blog to kind of type out my thoughts about medical school and maybe any advice to those of you who want to start or will be starting soon. I start in a little more than week. Ha, I wonder if anyone is even reading this. Please feel free to drop me comments and if anyone needs help on writing a personal statement, proof reading one, or anything at all hit me up...I'll be more than happy to do whatever I can...

-peace-

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Good stuff man. Any more info is always imporant.

D.O. Medical Student said...

thanks a lot bro...yeah i'll be updating it again sometime this week (i start orientation at CCOM)...

be sure to come back and if you have any questions or maybe suggestions about what I should be writing about on these blogs feel free to drop me a line here...

-peace-

Anonymous said...

Good words.