The Eventual Doc

No, I’m not dead. These past few months have been fairly busy, and I haven’t had the time to post much of anything lately. Luckily, today marks a brief lull in the action, and I have returned once again! Hopefully my return is welcome to the two people who actually read my blog.

So my application cycle is finally officially over. The final tally isn’t necessarily something of which I’m proud, though I agree with the prevailing wisdom: It only takes one.

And I’ve got it!

Boston University accepted me in January, so I canceled my interview at SUNY Stony Brook, and have decided to attend BU. This means the final tally is as follows:

1. Warren Alpert (Brown)
2. Tufts
3. Boston University
4. Yale (heh)
5. University of Michigan (my father’s alma mater)
6. Washington University in St. Louis
7. Dartmouth
8. Medical University of South Carolina (more for the fiancee than for me)
9. University of North Carolina
10. Mayo
11. University of Vermont
12. University of Rochester
13. Georgetown
14. Baylor
15. SUNY Stony Brook (Interview offered, application withdrawn)

A few thoughts on my application strategy: First of all, as some have noted on SDN, the list of schools to which I applied represents largely a pipe dream, based upon my undergraduate GPA. I pulled a complete Icarus here, applying to several schools to which I had no business applying. I mean, really – Yale? Yale?! What in great fucknuts was I thinking?

That said, SMPs currently occupy a strange no-man’s-land of application-strengthening programs. Just how much can an SMP resolve issues from undergraduate performance? As my application cycle demonstrates, only so much. It won’t erase past mistakes, and it can’t convince schools to open your file if they wouldn’t have anyway (partially because the grades from a SMP are buried in your graduate GPA).

What an SMP can do is get you a foot in the door at the school offering the program. Thus, I got an interview at BU, and got an acceptance. In the coming days, I’ll post a more thorough analysis of the cycle, but I figured that as I’ve been remiss in posting for the past few months, I ought to at least check in.

Good luck to anyone still waiting.