Educational Update

    My blood pressure just dropped a few more notches.   I am SOOOOO relaxed right now.  I might just slither out of my chair and onto the floor. 

    So my application to osteopathic school is one more step closer to actually being submitted to my schools of choice.  It’s a long story.  And a long blog post.  Sorry about that.  If you don’t want the back story, just skip to like, the last paragraph.  To apply to medical school, one has to fill out a primary application, which has all of your grades, all of the classes you’ve ever taken for college credit at any institution, a stress-inducing, vaguely-termed “personal statement,” and all of your demographic information.  Then, once you submit that application, it goes to the schools that you designate, they look it over, and pick people that they think will be a good fit.  Then they invite these people for interviews, and then pick out of that pool in order to find the class of 2017 for the University of Wherever.  It’s a grueling process and takes a very long time.

    So.  I started my application in June, right after I found out my MCAT scores.  I spent a long time thinking up and polishing my personal statement (with lots of help from Ben, who is a wonderful person for putting up with my incessant demands for his editing skills), so by the time I submitted it, it was the end of June.  It’s supposed to take like 4 weeks for the application to get spammed out to the individual schools, so after 3 weeks, I logged onto the application site every day to check the status.  After 4.5 weeks, I bumped it up to twice a day, in hopes that my vigilance would convince the nebulous pool of application service employees that I really really REALLY wanted this.  After 5 weeks, a member of that nebulous pool sent me an email being like, “hey, we noticed you took a class in Guatemala and listed it on your transcript for Bethel… but you need documentation from the Guatemala school.  And until we get that documentation, your application is just going to sit and wait.”  That was on the same day (and the same hour, I think) that one of the managers for General Medicine at UCSF called me and told me that, because I was a UCSF employee, I actually couldn’t shadow their doctors, which was my last hope of finding someone in the Bay Area to shadow and to write me a letter of recommendation.  It was a bad day.  I sat in the bathroom over my lunch hour and just cried.  It was very pathetic. 

    But then I got my act together and spammed out a desperate-sounding email to the school in Guatemala, being like “OMG YOU GUYS I NEEEEEEED YOU TO HELP ME!!!”  I was expecting all of my med school dreams to come crashing down around my ears because of this stupid transcript, because the staff at this school is kind of bad about returning emails.  Like, when Roxanne and Ruthi and I went in 2010, they took a month to get back to us.  But, miracle of miracles, they returned my email in ONE DAY.  I was totally blown away.  So I responded to the email in Spanish, foolishly, because then they responded in Spanish, of course.  So here I was, panicking about my transcripts, trying desperately to convey what needed to happen (which I’m sure they were already aware of), in a second language, at work (because of course my Internet was also out at my house.  Of course), and then trying to read their emails enough to respond to them.  It was a rough week, but eventually we got it figured out. 

    Meanwhile, I sent a Facebook message of the daughter of my high school biology teacher (who happens to be a D.O, and had offered to let me shadow) being like “OMG I NEEEEEED YOU TO HELP ME!!!!!!”   She lives in K.C, and I live in the Bay Area, so it was not really a plausible solution until I had run out of all other possible solutions.  She very graciously agreed to help me out, for which I am eternally grateful. 

    AND FINALLY, after the Guatemalan school agreed to send my transcripts, after my D.O. Facebook friend agreed to let me shadow, and after my Internet at my house had been turned back on, THE PINNACLE occurred.  2.5 weeks after being sent, after checking my application twice a day for two weeks, my transcripts arrived at the application service, and somebody in the nebulous cloud of application service employees entered it into my application.  Thank goodness I decided to check today!  I decided over lunch that I wouldn’t, because it would just be disappointing.  BUT IT WASN’T.  So I clicked the “submit” button.

   And now we wait.  And exhaaaaale.  It’s been a rough two months in terms of med school applications.