From medical school application to the first day of medical school: What’s in between?




The Pre-Med Podcast show

Summary: Episode 14: Life after the medical school application? How to preempt the unexpected with a surprising amount of foresight! ==================================================== The medical school application is only one phase of your life. In this podcast and blog, I put this event in to the context of the entire medical school application process, give you some things to look forward to and prepare for, as well as direct you to where you can find an entire archive of tips like these all in one place. By the time you submit your medical school application, you deserve a pat on the back. After all, you've completed the MCAT (in most cases), most of the medical school prerequisites and college, and overcome a large part of the mind game - talking yourself out of it. Many people change their mind and a growing trend is for ill informed pre-health advisers, with no qualification to speak on the subject, to discourage attending medical school. From the time you submit your medical school application to the time you start your first day of medical school, there are a lot of activities that take place. Interviews, ranking programs for the electronic match, match day, welcome parties, moving, and shopping. Oh yea, and preparing those closest to you that you're about the be besieged by books and to prepare for some distance. Let's take each of these in turn... Getting an interview is often the hardest part to getting into medical school. More specifically, getting an adequate number of interviews. How many medical school interviews is enough? Most people feel ten is a good number. Why so many? Because they interview 7-10 times more students than they have seats for. After you complete all of your interviews, you log in to the online ranking and matching service and rank the programs in order of your preference (only the ones you interviewed at). If there's a school you don't want to go to under any circumstances, you don't have to rank it in your list even if you interviewed there. An important step is to "certify your rank order list". You can rearrange the list as you decide for weeks, but once you certify it there's no turning back. (I certified mine the day before.) If you don't certify you're not in the match, so don't wait too long. I made a video tutorial on the match application and ranking system. It's the only behind-the-scenes look available and I'll tell you how to get your hands on it at the end of this podcast. In November of 2008, I released Episode 9 and we discussed drastic changes in the match system, primarily those in the Texas system. You can visit that episode in iTunes or MedicalMastery.com. Match day will be memorable no matter what happens. At a certain day and time, usually around February or March, thousands log in to the online ranking service to find out if they've matched and where. The match also occurs in the 4th year of med school and is very similar, but I thought I'd discuss the differences here. This is really similar to a 3-day process, so let's take the events in order: Day 1: Login to see if you matched or not. It tells you YES or NO, not where you matched. Day 2: Those that didn't match are able to view a list of all programs that have unfilled residency positions. Your medical school usually helps you find a program somewhere during a 48 hour period known as the scramble. Day 3: Two days later you meet at your school and usually have some sort of ceremony to find out where you matched. Included in my archives are a Video on residency considerations and an article on program results by specialty. Many medical schools have some sort of Welcome Weekend, or event before medical school that allows you to meet people, loosen up, and get psyched for medical school. In my school we did this the weekend right before it started. This is a very fun time and where you'll meet many lifelong friends. ====================================================