Ep. 20: Match Day

Happy Friday, everyone! 🌻 

EXCITING news to share: We matched into my #1 spot at Travis Air Force Base/UC Davis Family Medicine Residency Program in Northern California (our home!). The journey to this point has been LONG and challenging, largely because I didn’t have anyone to look to. Karla and I happen to be the first in our families to obtain a 4-year degree, much less a doctorate in our families, so there was a ton of figuring it out for the both of us!

This week, I want to briefly share my path, in the hope that others interested in medicine/becoming a medical doctor can avoid the MANY pitfalls that we did.

This is my recommendation to make it into medicine!

1. Obtain a 4-year bachelor’s degree of your choosing. Ideally, choose a degree that includes courses that overlap with the pre-medical trajectory. Ie. any of the STEM paths, or in my case, Nutritional Science: Physiology & Metabolism.

2. Once you have your 4-year degree, or even before, you have to take the MCAT. This is a beastly exam that quickly screens applicants from medical school. My recommendation is to study hard and get good grades during your 4-year science degree because SO much of the MCAT is applying what you should understand at a deeper level (the basic sciences).

3. Gain experience in medicine or healthcare either during or after obtaining your bachelor’s degree. Some of the most insightful experiences in healthcare that I gained included working as a Pharmacy Technician, Medical Scribe, Quality Improvement Researcher, and various community health leadership roles. These experiences are irreplaceable. You will see if you can make an impact in medicine or not! These days, you can’t skip this step either, so there’s that.

4. Once you have a 4 year degree (with a competitive GPA), and a competitive MCAT score, it’s time to start researching medical schools that you will apply to. Apply to American schools (M.D. & D.O.) that accept applicants with similar numbers that you have (GPA & MCAT score).

5. If you pass the school’s applicant filters, you’ll be invited to apply AGAIN to that specific school (called a secondary application) which is a good sign but still far from an invitation for an interview.

6. If all that goes well—your answers/experiences are special and specific to the school’s mission statement— you will be invited for an interview. At this step, you’re at about a 50% chance of getting in. You have to crush this step, demonstrating you’re not a robot and that you genuinely care about the well-being of humans.

7. If that goes well, you should get accepted and humbled at the same time; hopefully the former before the latter!

8. At this stage, you should think about how you will pay for medical school, what you might want to specialize in (determines years of residency post-grad) etc. Many choose loans, consider payback opportunities, or in my case, a Health Professions Scholarship (HPSP) granted by the US Air Force.

9. The HPSP is an outstanding program and for me, was an opportunity to give back to my country through my passions for science and medicine, since she has given me and my family SO much. 🗽 The HPSP program is yet another application and in my year, there were about 90 seats for the entire US. You can apply once you have an admission letter from a US-accredited medical school in hand!

10. Then the hard stuff begins—medical school is extremely challenging academically, and emotionally, and once you’re in your clinical years, physically draining as well. Learning and testing never stop. Once you’re through all of that, then you apply AGAIN for residency, which is like applying to medical school all over again, except instead of 80-150 seats in a med school class, there are 2-12 seats in a residency class.

11. All that to say, seeking a life in medicine needs to be more than just getting a job. If you’re thinking of medicine for the money, don’t do it, it’s simply not worth it. If you genuinely enjoy learning, especially about people, science, technology, and healing, then all of the above is how you can do it too!

    If anyone has any specific questions about the med school path, please never hesitate to respond to any of these emails! Me AND Karla (She's going to be a Dentist, which is a similar process to becoming a medical doctor) are always here to chat, share our experiences, or offer any advice if we can!
    

    Here is a more thorough summary, which includes years, costs, links to application portals, etc.

    I’ll end with some wisdom I came across this week

    “By fighting you never get enough, but by yielding you get more than you expected.”

    Over three hundred years ago Galileo said: “You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him to find it within himself.”

    “We should not trust the masses who say only the free can be educated, but rather the lovers of wisdom who say that only the educated are free”

I hope everyone has a wonderful start to the weekend! 🌻 

Deepak

Currently: 📖 : Reading | 👀: watching/listening | 🎵: song of the week | 🥷: Team messages

📖 : The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday

👀 : Leave The World Behind -Netflix

🎵 : Take Me Home, Country Roads- Lana del Rey cover

🥷:  Ehm Academy Interest form found here for teaching/mentoring inquiries ⚡️