The following is a guest contribution from GeekDoc.

It’s a bitter sweet time of year for med school hopefuls. Those who are applying find out whether or not they’ll be going to medical school in the fall. Tears of happiness, tears of joy, tears caused by your disappointed mother throwing her shoe at you for getting a 29O instead of a 45T on your MCAT., become a normal part of your everyday life. I just wanted to reach out to my friends and say, I know what you’re going through; I feel your pain. I wish someone had explained the process in terms that I’d understand. Hopefully this will act as a beacon of “truthiness” for future pre-meds.

For Future Applicants:

The application process is every bit the dog-and-pony show that you imagine it to be. It starts with a four year struggle to out pace every hardcore science geek on their own turf. You spend every waking minute trying to distinguish between Cys and Trans, E and Z, Cocci and Baccili, only to realize that 100 of your peers will probably know this better than you come test day.

The lucky few who do manage to maintain their sanity while spending every waking minute studying, lose it when they realize that they have to write several essays demonstrating how they did not spend every waking minute of the last few years studying, but rather took the time to “help people”

And isn’t that why we all wanted to become physicians in the first place? To help people? And by people, I mean people other than your mom and dad who will probably spend the next few years introducing you to their friends as “this is my Son (or daughter)….the doctor”.

For the few who manage to be talented enough to strike a balance between spending every waking minute studying, and delivering children in a refugee camp in sub-Saharan Africa to compensate for that A- you got in Organic Chemistry, may be lucky enough to be invited to an interview. It’s the interview that people long for, a chance to set themselves apart by professing their undying love for the school, medicine, and if need be, their interviewer.

If your act strikes the right chord with the right people, you may be part of the small group who receive a big matte yellow envelope in the mail, screaming “Congratulations, You’ve Been Accepted!!!”.

So, my friends, don’t worry to much about the application process, we all go through it. Think of it as a right of passage, a chance to become part of the medical brotherhood. It’s a necessary evil, a show that we all take part in.

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