This past Saturday, I got my first interview invitation. The feeling of knowing that at least one medical school doesn’t think I suck at life is incredible. ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE. The pressure’s not off at all, and I realize that, but it feels so rewarding just to know I’ve made it to this stage for at least one school. My interview is going to be on December 11, which is coming right on up (!!!), so I plan to write a post about the whole experience as soon as I can after the interview.
The interview in question is to the Brody School of Medicine at ECU, in Greenville, NC. Their focus is mainly on producing primary care physicians for rural and/or underserved areas of North Carolina. I am still toying with the idea of primary care as a specialty, but at this point, I am feeling slightly more drawn to general surgery or cardiology. Regardless, in spending considerable time working this summer in an area of North Carolina that is extremely low on the socioeconomic totem pole, I was blessed to truly get to know some of the fantastic people who live there without sufficient access to healthcare, and as such, training for practicing in underserved areas is of immense importance to me. I could definitely see myself thriving in this learning environment and contributing significantly to the next entering class as a result of those experiences. (Would you just take a look at these bragging skills, you guys? I am so much better at tasteful self-promotion than I was pre-personal-statement. I suppose that’s an important skill to have in any sort of competitive application process. Med school apps can change a woman.)
The Brody School of Medicine at ECU
This one is extremely exciting to me (not that any of them aren’t, but relatively speaking, this one is super cool), because it’s one of the few school in my home state to which I applied. Also, it’s public. And public school + school that’s in the same state as my legal residence = BEAUTIFUL, BEAUTIFUL CHEAP TUITION. I’m sure I’m not the only one swayed extensively by cheap tuition…a girl’s gotta eat, y’all.
I have high hopes for BSOM, because Greenville is a really great little town that’s only an hour and a half from my parents’ home, and the opportunity to visit my family during med school would be awesome. Their website says they receive 800-900 AMCAS applications per year, almost exclusively from in-state applicants, and they end up extending about 120 offers to fill an 80-person class. I am not completely sure how many applicants they interview per year, but as of November 1, they have interviewed 240 students and extended 20 offers. For the sake of making assumptions, if we say they end up interviewing 300-350 applicants, that means they accept about 35 to 40% of the applicants who accept interview invitations. Regardless, the majority of the class has yet to be filled, so there is hope. If y’all pray, I would greatly appreciate a prayer or two as I go into this interview in a couple of weeks. I will definitely need them!
ANYWAY, update on the rest of my application life (so really, my whole life): I’ve submitted 13 secondaries. I actually can’t believe I’ve written that many essays about myself in such a short time frame; it’s pretty crazy, y’all. It was incredibly hard, time-consuming work, but I’m very proud of my finished products from the past few weeks. I have two applications left to complete; one I had already received, and the other I received today, because I added an extra school to my AMCAS application last week. This means there is only one last lonely school on my list that has yet to send me a secondary. I haven’t heard any news to the contrary, so I assume I haven’t been rejected by that school yet. I cannot wait to be done with this stage of the process.
Artistic rendering of myself and my lovely collection of secondaries (except not really).
Getting to the M.D. 