At church one Sunday, I passed my husband in the hallway as he chatted with another member, a middle-aged man named Felix (name and other details changed).
“I just have these awful headaches,” Felix said, grimacing. “Sometimes they’re so bad, I can’t get out of bed.”
Ten minutes later, I came back to find Joe sitting by himself on the foyer couch and reading something on his phone. He looked up at at me and explained, “I think Felix is experiencing tension headaches from some sort of stress.”
After church ended, Joe took this brother aside and had a heart-to-heart where Felix admitted that he was overdue on many bills and out of food. Joe was right-- these headaches were from some pretty serious stresses. With Felix’s permission, the leaders of our local congregation were able to give short-term relief and long-term guidance and care.
I was overwhelmed. This was the first time that I had seen my husband correctly diagnose and fix a problem. After years of studying, years of tests, and years of sacrifice, it first became real that my husband would be a doctor someday and would have the incredible ability to diagnose, help, and heal.
For our entire family, it is a dream come true.
--
It’s been a long road.
Joe first applied to medical school in 2012 when we were newlyweds. He spent an entire summer crafting his application and submitting it through AMCAS, the website that deals with all medical school applications.
Well, we were denied. There was one interview but Joe wasn’t sold on their program. They also didn’t offer us a spot.
“What should we do?” we asked each other. After an entire year of effort, we were back to square one.
“Is it worth it to try again?” I asked him.
It was. Becoming a physician was Joe’s dream, but his efforts thus far simply hadn’t been enough.
We decided to take off an entire year to improve Joe’s resume and credentials, then we would reapply.
For a year, I worked for little more than minimum wage as an underling at a law office while Joe studied to retake the MCAT, volunteered as a Spanish-speaking translator at the free health clinic, and trained as an EMT. He also shadowed at many clinics and volunteered at the hospital.
He walked to all of these appointments since we only had the one car and I needed it to get to work.
I became pregnant with our first little girl about this time, and now it was both of us sacrificing for our little family.
After a solid six months of studying, Joe retook the MCAT. His score went from ‘Meh’ average to ‘Holy Cow’ above average.
He also got a job working as a gastroenterology tech in the local hospital because we now understood that job experience trumped shadowing in a medical school application.
(When they welcomed him to the job, by the way, they jokingly gave him a toilet-shaped candy. Joe and I were pretty amused. We may still have it somewhere).
By now, it was summer and time again to put together the AMCAS application. This time, there was a lot more meat to put in there and we were hopeful.
Medical schools do rolling admissions, meaning that they evaluate applications as they come in. It’s to an applicant's extreme advantage to get everything submitted as soon as possible.
Many schools will look over the initial application and then send out secondaries to promising students. These secondaries are a second set of essays specific to the school. Secondaries also need to be sent back as soon as possible and often are capped by a hard deadline.
Some of the essays overlapped between schools, but all of them needed to be carefully crafted. It took many, many hours of work and grit to get through each layer of essays.
(In fact, our daughter Chantelle was born on the day that applications were due for OHSU in Portland, Oregon. I had my daughter, was taken to the Mother-Baby wing, and then Joe and I each pulled out our computers to take a final look at his essays).
By now, we had submitted the primary application, then received and submitted the secondaries. The next step was medical school interviews.
The first time we applied, we received one interview. After a year of hard study and work, Joe’s application earned 12 interviews all over the country.
He would take the train to the airport and fly off to the new city. Car rental, hotel, and a little city exploration followed. Usually, he would also drive the route between the hotel and the school to be absolutely sure that the next morning would go smoothly. Neither of us owned smart phones, so the ability to navigate without getting lost was essential.
The school would ask the applicants to meet on the morning of the interview, usually at 8:00AM (and you DO NOT want to be late!!). It was typical for the school to provide a continental breakfast or an informal lunch.
The format then differs. At Pittsburgh there is an initial orientation, after which the interviewees are taken on a long tour with one of the current students. They go through the school (including the cadaver lab), the city, the simulation facility, and the main hospital.
Usually, there will be two long interviews, maybe around forty-five minutes per interview. Sometimes one interview is led by a current student, and sometimes both interviews are faculty members. These interviews can be grueling, depending on how intense the interviewer chooses to be.
I’m pretty sure that the applicants sign a form promising confidentiality, because Joe has never given details when telling me about his interviews.
He has said that it’s important to know your own application and essays well. It’s also important to have a good understanding of the school and to take each interview very seriously.
After the interviews are over, the applicants go home and prepare for the next interview, all the while waiting with fingernails in teeth to hear back.
The competition is fierce. Even with Joe’s improved and impressive application, we were mostly waitlisted. We did receive upfront acceptances from a few schools, but none of them were quite where Joe wanted to go.
It makes sense that there are so many waitlists involved with medical school. The more impressive candidates may receive multiple acceptances, but they ultimately will only take one. As they choose their final school and reject the others, those other schools will open up those slots to other applicants, and the trickle-down effect continues.
This is precisely what happened to us. Joe was removed from the waitlist and offered a concrete acceptance from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and we were ecstatic. There was still a possibility of an acceptance from Duke or Vanderbilt up until the end, but we were delighted with the chance to come to Pittsburgh. The interview here had gone well and Joe just fell in love with the city.
Pittsburgh it was.
So, in the summer of 2015, we packed all of our belongings into six feet of space in a semi truck and our family of three started a cross-country trip, from Utah to Pennsylvania.
(It was amazing, by the way. Every American ought to do a cross-country drive at least once in their lifetimes.)
So began the journey for my husband to become a doctor, the dream he had been chasing for over ten years.
--Jenna
