meditations on the pre-medical process

soon i'm going to start a med school blog, as inspired by some i have skimmed over the past week

first i wanted to bring to light this very basic notion that has somehow eluded me until today. luckily someone on sdn was patient and kind enough to comfort another person and i suppose has unintentionally consoled me.

to summarize, as a pre-med, i have been used to taking initiative, throwing myself at opportunities, searching for possible passions, diving in head-first and stacking up my activities and racking up experiences that not only "look good" but that i had a genuine interest in. so this entire application process is incredibly stressful because of how LITTLE i can do. in college, i was allowed to do as much as i wanted to and i could control my schedule, my activities, my classes, everything. of course the actual performance was more difficult to execute, but most of my doings were governed by my choices.

compare this experience with the medical school applications process. from the minute you begin asking for letters of recommendation, you surrender most of your control. you have no idea what these professors or supervisors are going to write. you hope that your dedication and hard work have made a good impression on them and they'll do you justice. you hope that they'll be timely and when you email them to give them gentle reminders you hope they don't get offended. you hope that they take these gentle reminders and run with them, but you also know they are busy and probably have a million other things to do before getting to your singular letter. you hope that it won't be too generic, and that they follow the instructions to a t, or else someone is going to have to clean up that mess later and you know that someone is inevitably going to be you.

from the submission of your secondary applications, you give up the better half of a year anxiously waiting for rejections, interview invitations, or you stew in the silence, wondering what else you can do. and really, there is little. you can call, you can obsess over sdn where people are succeeding much more than you left and right. you want to talk about this agonizing process with your friends but how much can they really empathize? you don't blame them because you don't want anyone you love to ever go through something as torturous and gut-wrenching as this.

you wait and wait to write these supposed letters of interest that are supposed to help because you've heard stories about how they work. and the poster at sdn makes the perfect point of how we hold on to these granules of hope and write our letters with zeal as well, because they make us feel better. doing this makes us feel like we're doing something, having some control over the situation. in reality, these letters are likely to be stashed away, to be forgotten about, slipped in between your primary app and your transcripts, never to be read. but we go on writing them because we hope that this is the one thing that can sway these committees one way or another. these omnipotent juries that will dictate our fates for the next four years and probably the course of our careers. we obsess over the wording, over what may be construed as grammatical errors. we strategize when to send them, to whom to address the letter to.

and all for what? to relieve our stress of waiting in silence. to make us think that we have some clarity in this cloudy process. to focus on something, anything. to eliminate future regret about "not having done enough" or "put in all of one's effort".

seriously, this journey is NOT for the faint of heart. in fact it's quite a masochistic path. and the real trip hasn't even begun.