The Medical School HQ Podcast: Premed | Med School | Residency | MCAT | USMLE | COMLEX

Financial planning for medical school, and looking at your options for student loans should be like shopping for the lastest and greatest smartphone. We can easily recite prices and numbers for phones, but when it comes to comparing different options to help pay for our studies, we're all clueless.

Medical school is expensive. There are no two ways about it. Fortunately there are scholarships available. We already covered the Air Force HPSP scholarship in session 18. For this session, we are talking with the National Health Service Corps (NHSC) from the US. Department of Health & Human Services.   Authorized in 1974, the NHSC was created to address the shortage of primary care physicians, especially in rural America.

Dr. Norma Wagoner was offered the Dean of Admissions job at Rush University not long after graduating with her Ph.D. in Anatomy. Since then, she has been heavily involved with the admissions process, which is almost 30 years now. She has carried many different titles, including Dean of Students at the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Medicine for 10 years, Dean of Admissions at the University of Colorado.   We talked about some of the changes in admissions for both the medical school side and applicant side that she has seen over the last 30 years.   We dig into and talk about what admissions committees are looking for in an applicant. She talks about the core competencies that the school requires in students and how those core competencies drive the application process.

Want to go to medical school for free? Travel the world? And fulfill your passion of being a physician? Ok, enough of the sales pitch. Session 18 of The Medical School HQ Podcast is an interview with TSgt Satinksy. She is the Air Force Health Professions Scholarship Program recruiter for the New England area.  This is a topic that I covered a little bit with the Lost in PreMed Podcast, and something I probably could have covered myself.

The Medical School HQ Podcast had the opportunity to talk to Chris Manuel from The Princeton Review. He talks about the key things to know about the MCAT - how to prepare for the MCAT, do's and don'ts and more. Take a listen to hear from somebody who scored in the 99.9% (he thinks he missed 6 questions overall).  Even if you are going to take Kaplan or any other MCAT Prep course, listen to this podcast. We do go over some of the ways The Princeton Review can help you, and some of the advantages it may have over other test prep companies, but Chris also explains a lot about what and how he teaches MCAT Prep to his students and other teachers.  Chris also gives some great tips for all pre med students, including what to major in to get the best GPA, the type of volunteering to do, and even jobs to get in the hospital. To top it off, he also talks about what to write about in your personal statement.

What an opportunity we had for this session of The Medical School HQ Podcast! Dr. Muller, Dean for Medical Education at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (MSSM) took some time to go in-depth with us about FlexMed.  FlexMed is the newest iteration on what MSSM has had since 1987, HuMed. HuMed has allowed college sophomores and juniors to apply to MSSM and if accepted, skip the majority of the "normal" premed requirements. This includes not taking the MCAT! This has allowed the students to follow their passions in other areas, whether it be language, writing or something else.  Dr. Muller shares with us how FlexMed is taking everything they have learned from HuMed, and improving upon it moving forward. HuMed historically has been a 1/4 of the incoming class. FlexMed looks to have that increase to 1/2 of the class in the coming years.  In 2010 Dr. Muller and others published an article (link below) in the journal of Academic Medicine showing that, for the most part, HuMed students do just as well as "normal" premed students.  For interested students, listen to find out who the ideal applicant is for the FlexMed program.

For session 15, The Medical School HQ Podcast welcomes David Koenecke, the Assistant Vice President of Admissions at A.T. Still University's Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine (KCOM).  David shares some of the history of KCOM with us. If you don't know, KCOM was THE FIRST osteopathic medical school in the world. It was formerly known as American School of Osteopathy.

In Session 14 of The Medical School HQ Podcast, Roheet from TheBiopsy.com was kind enough to sit down with us and share his journey through the pre med process. Listen to find out how a newspaper changed his career path.  Roheet graduated from UCSD with a biomedical engineering degree and is currently in his gap year. He is in the middle of interview season, hoping to land one of the 20,000 or so seats to next years starting allopathic medical school class.  He is in a gap year because he had to reapply, not getting in to medical school his first time applying. Something not unusual these days, and something I had to do as well. He had a great MCAT score, a 33. He also had a good GPA at 3.6. So what was the biggest reason he didn't get in the first time? Better question, what was the reason he didn't even get an interview?

In Session 13 of The Medical School HQ Podcast we had the pleasure of talking to Dr. German, the Dean of The University of Central Florida College of Medicine (UCF COM). UCF COM was the first, built from the ground up, allopathic medical school in the US in almost 30 years.   It gained full accreditation this past week which is excellent! Their inaugural class is graduating this year and will find out their fate in the Match in March.

Allison and I join forces again for another session of The Medical School HQ Podcast.   For this session we talk about shadowing. We've already done a post about shadowing physicians, but we thought it would be good to revisit the subject since it seems to be a common question among premed students.

In Session 11 I talk to Kate. She recently turned 56-years-old, and is a 3rd year medical student at West Virginia School of Medicine. AMAZING! You can read a profile that she wrote for us already here.   Kate shares with us her story of switching from a biology major, focusing on premed, to nursing and how at age 50, she got the itch to go back to school to become a physician. One of the decisions that helped her make the decision to switch to nursing was the cut-throat culture of the premed (I'm hoping to change that here!).

Session 10 of The Medical School HQ Podcast brings you what I hope is the start to many expert interviews involving deans of medical schools and deans of postbac programs. These experts are the reason I started the podcast. These are the people that have the most up-to-date information, the most unbiased information when it comes to helping YOU on your path to becoming a physician. For Session 10 I interviewed Dr. Victoria Rosner. She is the Associate Dean and GS Coordinator of Academic Affairs at Columbia's Postbac Premed Program.

Ryan is an MS1 (1st year medical student) and is at Western University College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific. He blogs at WhiteCoatDO.com and his old website is PracticalPremed.com. He studied microbiology at UC Santa Barbara and shares how his undergrad classes has helped him in medical school. Ryan talks about the transition from undergrad to medical school and how he’s studying 8 hours a day. He had heard from others about how much there was to study, but he never believed it. Now he’s living it! We have a brief discussion about some recent news about some medical schools offering 3 year medical school curriculum.

Session 8 of The Medical School HQ Podcast brings another great story from a non-traditional pre med student. Our first non-traditional interview was with Russell during Session 6. If you are still unsure about what a non-traditional student is, check out our interview with Rich from OldPreMeds.org during Session 5. Like Russell, Torray has been teaching for the last decade as an English teacher. He talks to us about how some poor pre med advising during his undergraduate career led him AWAY from medicine. Then some health problems, as often the case is, lead him to rethink his career path.

The Medical School HQ Podcast has reached 7 episodes! In this podcast I have a special guest co-host, my wife, Allison Gray. As of the publishing of this podcast, she is a Senior Neurology Resident in her last year of residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. You can read more about her in our About page.   We received a very personal email from a reader describing her own struggles and her dream of becoming a physician; she also asked some important questions, and we wanted to answer her question and make our answer available to everyone, so we did a podcast about it.