Archive : Medical School Admissions

You probably already know that the application process can be lengthy, time-consuming, and expensive, with no ironclad guarantee of admission — even with a stellar GPA and MCAT score. And, no matter how much work you put into the process, there are no guarantees about the outcome.

So, before you start, what should you be thinking about before you apply?

Getting rejected is hard stuff. What makes it even more painful is that few MBA programs (or law schools or medical schools) give rejected applicants specific feedback on why they didn’t get in. Applicants just want to know what they “did wrong” to not get in, but, even when schools do provide feedback, the applicants normally end up confused and still guessing about what to do next.

What’s the deal? Are admissions officers trying to obfuscate the process, keeping you in the dark so that you can’t “game” the system? Are they just cold hearted, not caring about you, especially once they’ve decided they don’t want you? No and no. The truth is that, when someone gets rejected, it’s often because the school just couldn’t find any great reason to admit them over thousands of other applicants.

Next week yours truly will deliver a speech at a wedding. I have known the groom for nearly two decades, and I consider him to be one of my closest friends, even though distance unfortunately keeps us apart most of the time (I live in California and he lives in Beijing). While I don’t consider myself to be an expert toastmaster, I’m not too worried, since I know that what makes for a great admissions essay or personal statement also makes for a terrific wedding speech.

Think back for a minute and consider the last few weddings you’ve been to. If you’re lucky, you only have witnessed great wedding speeches and toasts, but odds are that you’ve sat through at least one or two bombs. What accounts for the difference?

Recently the Chronicle of Higher Education published a piece written by an anonymous “hired gun” who writes admissions essays, term papers, and even doctoral theses for paying students, who in turn pass these off as their own. Not long after that, Bloomberg Businessweek ran a similar article that profiled a couple of similar services that write essays for business school applicants. (Veritas Prep was actually mentioned as an ethical alternative to these services in the latter article.)

Two things really bother us about the existence of these services. Is one of them the fact that they’re unethical and shady? Well, yes, we do think that, but that’s so obvious that we won’t devote any more words to it here. (If you’re the type to consider buying your essays from someone, then maybe becoming a business leader or a lawyer or a doctor isn’t the best path for you.)

If you’re applying to graduate school this year, there’s a good chance that right now you’re surfing the Internet while procrastinating on writing your admissions essays or personal statement. The Internet is the ultimate procrastination tool, after all, but hopefully finding this article will be the best thing that could have happened to your essays.

The term “writer’s block” means different things to different people, but here we’ll use it to describe any situation where you know what’s on paper (or on your computer screen) is far from being a finished product that you’ll be happy to submit as part of your finished application. Maybe you just can’t think about what to start writing about (this is what most people think of when they hear “writer’s block”), but an even tougher case can be when you’re staring at a nearly-finished essay and you just know that it’s not working. In either case, try these three things to clear your mind and start fresh

An application tip for the graduate school candidate.

Most of our time writing on this blog is spent diving into the nuance and nitty gritty of GMAT prep and the MBA admissions process. Every once in a while, it helps to take a step back and look at things from a very fundamental, building-block level.

Last week, Michael Kinsley, the editor-at-large for the Atlantic Wire, wrote an op-ed piece on the admissions process that highlighted some of the reasons why things have become so competitive and cutthroat over the years. The piece focused primarily on college admissions, but there are multiple mentions of graduate school and examples of HBS, so it seems fair to consider Kinsley’s words from the perspective of graduate school admissions.

Considering the impact of the Internet and social networking sites like Facebook on the admissions process has quickly become a pretty tired story. Yes, students should take care to manage their online presence, but no, admissions officers are unlikely to search every nook and cranny of the Web to “bust” applicants. As it relates to MBA and law school admissions, there’s not much to discuss in this area.

We’ve been helping business school applicants for a long time now, so long that it’s easy to forget that we didn’t start out in that business. After Veritas Prep co-founders Markus Moberg and Chad Troutwine launched our GMAT prep service in 2002, it quickly became apparent that our students not only needed GMAT help, but they also needed help in pulling together their entire business school applications. How did we know? Because they came back to us time and time again, asking us to help them with their applications just as we helped them with their GMAT prep.

The medical school application process is a marathon, not a sprint, as it features an AMCAS application (featuring most of the admin work, a slew of short answer questions, and the always-difficult personal statement), secondary applications for individual schools, and then interview days at select programs. The whole thing lasts for nearly a year and the time spent tends to dwarf the application processes for other types of graduate programs.

Anyone with even a basic interest in medical school knows that the requirements for pursuing an MD are substantial. Pre-med courses, the MCAT, multiple stages of the application process, interview days — there are a ton of pieces to the puzzle and it all adds up to a tremendous amount of work. Everyone knows it is a grind. But is it the right grind? This is a question that is rarely posed, but that was both asked and answered recently in an important report called Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians, which was described in detail today on the Stanford News Service. This report makes a series of recommendations that call for subtle-yet-important changes in the way medical school candidates prepare for their graduate work.

The report was produced by a 22-person committee, which was tasked jointly by the AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2007. The committee was headed by Sharon Long, a Stanford biology professor and a former dean at the university, and calls for the following changes to the existing medical school requirements:

We are pleased to announce the latest offering to Veritas Prep’s many admissions consulting options: Medical School Admissions Consulting.