i knew spence wanted to go to med school. by the time we were engaged he had 1 class left to take. i pushed him to take the mcat that summer so we would be entering fall of 2012. as much as i pushed spencer didn't feel he was ready to take the mcat. considering we were getting married that summer he also felt that applications would be too stressful. he was right.
i was worried about him having a "break year". which is basically one year between undergrad and post-grad. he assured me he would be alright. so it was decided. he would take the mcat spring of 2011 and apply that summer.
we didn't wait that long to start the process though. after lots of research we found we needed to track his hours. service/work/leadership/research etc...so we started a google doc and started tracking. it was long and stressful but we were able to sit down and really remember all that he had done. we also compared what spencers activities looked like to the requirements of the university of utah. we were told that if he reached what they were requiring we'd be more than good to go. so we compared that to spence and got to work.
he started extra volunteer hours that fall. also did a lot of dr. shadowing. another thing we took care of in the fall was his letters of recommendation. it's never to early to request those. byu where spence went to school has a great pre-med program that allows for people to turn letters into them. they keep them all until the application opens and then at that point they will import them to the amcas letter program. (easy peasy).
i'll go more into this later...
fast forward. spence took a great mcat prep course and really did awesome on the test. (again the prep-course was the bomb.com). we started working on his application may of 2011 and turned it in early july 2011. we applied to about 30 md schools, 6 texas schools and 3 do schools.
started in late july he got requests for secondaries. at that point we narrowed our list to 25 md schools and 3 texas schools. spence decided that do wasn't the route he wanted to take so we veto'd those secondaries. interviews started in the fall. spence got invited for 10 interviews. lucky some of the longer trips we could bundle to save money. he decided to go to 8 of the interviews. a little more than average but we felt like it was worth it. finally in december we got our first acceptance. northwestern university in chicago. we were beyond thrilled.
1 acceptance, 1 rejection and 6 waitlists later here we are. we decided that northwestern was above 4 of the schools that waitlisted him. so we nicely dropped ourselves from those lists. so that leads us to now....still accepted and planning on northwestern but still on 2 waitlists.
we are still holding out hope that one of these two schools will come through. mainly because of $$ and location. northwestern is an incredible school and we're excited for chicago so if we don't hear good news from these other two schools we're still really excited.
so 3 years ago this time we had just started planning for where we are now. honestly we're still waiting and planning. we've decided to go full force on our own (no military though we considered it) and no government aid. these were both very personal decisions. i will continue to work full time and we'll see where we go from here.
we've learned a lot along the way and i'm excited to share a bit of what we've learned. for now here are a few sights...
university of utah med school requirements
amc prep for med school site (awesome!)
student doc (great of a good overview)
You've both mentioned D.O. schools in your posts. What is that for people that might not be aware that that's an option or even what it is?
ReplyDeletePriscilla! Thanks for your comment.
DeleteSo in the US there are two different kind of med school degrees you can get. MD and DO. According to Wikipedia "Holders of a D.O. are sometimes known as osteopathic physicians,[1] while holders of an M.D. are sometimes known as allopathic physicians." Basically DO is just another type of medical degree.
There really isn't much difference between the two anymore. In the beginning DO was a more holistic approach to medicine. In the end both DO and MD students take the same boards but the learning process is a little different. Though there is little difference there is enough of a difference between the teaching approaches that Spence (my husband) felt that MD was more of what he wanted to study.
So not the greatest definition but hope that helps! Again thanks for the comment!