Hurricane Jill

Lessons learned the hard way

Admissions committee meeting yesterday. It’s odd when you think about it: here I am flipping through a bunch of applications for med school, as people all over the country are flipping through my application for residency. It’s truly a miracle I ever got in to med school, anywhere.

I’m one of those slow people who reads the whole file. I figure it’s the least I can do, and you never know what interesting piece of info is hiding in all that verbiage. But at the end, I listen to my gut. So my score is sometimes different from other people’s. I hate making the committee review a file further, but some people just seem so boring and cookie-cutter I can’t see them here, no matter what their interviewers say. And I have yet to see any interviewer recommend anything other than to admit someone. So somebody’s gotta be the bad guy.

Plus, I’ve had student interviewers tell me that they always recommend admitting someone, which is just annoying to hear, because we rely on them to screen for people who’d be a good fit for Tulane. I suspect it’s mostly empathy at play, rather than any actual evaluation or judgment. Me, I don’t have a problem with that. I empathize, yes–how could I not? But my job is to judge, and if I say yes to all comers, then I’m just abdicating my responsibility. Plus, I have experience hiring people, and firing them as well, so I have at least some idea of what constitutes a real warning sign vs what looks bad but doesn’t mean anything.

When I was a student interviewer, I recommended admitting about 40%, and waitlisting almost everybody else. One person I recommended rejecting outright. She was about a year out from a major flake-out episode, without any explanation or any lessons learned. I mean, she could have told me she flaked because she was in love with her boyfriend and had to be with him, or something equally immature and short-sighted, and it would have been better than the explanation she gave. Or she could even have said, I didn’t have a good reason, and I realize now how stupid it was. My standards are pretty low when it comes to explaining dumb things people do in their late teens and early twenties. In fact, I kind of worry about people who haven’t done anything dumb in their lives. I’m convinced they’re time bombs that can explode at any moment.

So it was probably bad news to get me as an interviewer. But at least the committee could rely on my judgment when I recommended admission.

As for me, every program I’ve been to so far has asked me about my undergraduate transcript. I tried the Jedi mind trick at Baylor, to no avail:

PD: Hmmm, undergraduate transcripts…
Me: Oh, you don’t want to look at those.
PD: Yes I do. What happened here?
Me: {mentally cursing SFMatch} I wasn’t focused on school.
PD: {circling Fs and noting my GPA across time} Apparently not.
Me: {launching into my spiel} Well, I wasn’t planning on going to med school at the time. And there are two important things that transcript says about me…number 1, I finish what I start, despite all obstacles–even the ones I create for myself. And number 2, I’m not going to wake up sometime in the middle of residency and feel like I wasted my youth inside a hospital. And you’ll see from my med school transcript that it clearly wasn’t any kind of indicator as to what sort of student I would be.
PD: {changing the subject} So are you saying I’m going to wake up someday and feel like I wasted my youth? (smiling)
Me: (smiling) No, I’m just saying I’ve seen it happen…

So I have no idea what sort of impression I made. But it sucks to have to defend my undergraduate transcript, still, after 3 years of med school. Fortunately this time I have an answer, and also some evidence that it’s not representative of who I am now.

It was hard to come up with an answer to that question, though. But finally I realized that excuses aren’t necessary–all I really need to do is establish what I’ve learned from it and how it makes me a better applicant, and that I’m not like that anymore. What a beautiful moment it was when that albatross slipped from around my neck.