UAB Interview

I woke up and started my routine: showering, making coffee, and getting dressed. When I got to the dressing part of my routine I was still on time, but I realized that I had brought a shirt that was too small for me. I spent twenty minutes struggling with the top button of my shirt. My fingers were sore, and my neck looked like I had just survived a strangulation attempt from an assassin wielding piano wire.

I made it to the interview building feeling a little rushed and very cold. As soon as I made it to the room for the orientation I was pulled aside and photographed for use by the admissions committee. I don’t know what you look like when you’re trying to recover from the lowest temperatures of the year and a struggle with a shirt hell-bent on throttling you to death, but I’m pretty sure that my smile would have looked at home of the face of a serial killer.

At orientation we got a brief overview of the day and this interesting little tidbit: Immediately after all of the day’s interviews, the admissions committee would meet and share their opinion of each applicant. Then each member would fill out a report on the applicant which would be used to come up with scores for each applicant in various categories. Then the kicker: if each of your scores was above a predetermined threshold, they would send you notification of your acceptance on the very next day.

Armed with this knowledge (and the added incentive/pressure that went along with it), I rushed from the orientation to my first of three twenty-five minute interviews.

I was ushered into a decent sized office by my first member of the committee, and what followed was an amazingly laid back chat about my extracurricular activities. In what seemed like a blink of the eye, the interview concluded .We had gone slightly over the time limit as the interviewer pitched the reasons why I should come to UAB, but that was fine, as I had a break before my next interview.  There was a room designated for the applicants who had a break, complete with bagels, chewy bars, and orange juice, where we gathered and discussed what we had experienced with our interviewers. No one had had my second interviewer, but one guy had my last interviewer.

“Yeah, he basically just had me tell him what I did each year. I wish I had reviewed my AMCAS more so I didn’t make as many mistakes as I did.”

I had not reviewed the timeline of all of the things I had done, so I was a little nervous, wondering if this was a test to see how well I knew my history or to see if I was lying about anything. But, the time came for my second interview and I tried to wash those doubts away. I knocked on the door of my second interviewer’s office and was greeted by a middle aged woman who sat me down and gave me a warm greeting.

“Hey Jonathan! Now, you’re the one from Palm Beach, right?”

Me: Yeah, that’s where I was born.

Her: My husband is from there and we go down there all the time and I of course get plenty of shopping done.

Me: Wow, what a coincidence! (Internally: Yay! We’re friends now! And friends accept their friends into their medical school, right?)

But something went immediately wrong.  She asked me about my research, so I launched into the explanation of the projects I had been involved in. As I was speaking, I started listening to myself, and to my horror I realized that I sounded robotic and disinterested. As I began to realize what I sounded like my confidence drained from me and my voice became more and more faint and shaky. Finally I finished my account and tried to regroup before the next question, which was: what do you think you have gained from your research that you can take with you in your career in medicine? It was a simple question, nothing too difficult, but my mind snapped. All that came out of my mouth was work vomit. I was saying words, and they were somewhat linked to the question that had been asked, but it was just a string of items connected by ummms, therefores, and I believes.  Not long after I forced myself to stop speaking and the interview moved on, she asked if I had any questions for her. I glanced at my watch and realized that the interview had only lasted ten minutes. Ten minutes! Ten minutes? My last one went over twenty-five. What happened? Oh my goodness, she’s going to recommend that they throw my file away and pretend like I never came here.

I managed to ask my questions and then she thanked me, and showed me to the door. There was no attempt to convince me that I should come to UAB, just a goodbye, which in my state of frailty I even managed to mess up. My brain was so astounded with how poorly I thought I had performed that I could only parrot her as we said goodbye.

Her: Thank you for coming in.

Me: Thank you.

Her: It’s been my pleasure.

Me: My pleasure.

When I reached the waiting room, there were a few questions about why my interview had been so short, which I managed to dismiss with the coy statement, “well, I guess she got everything that she wanted.”

I managed to relax a little in the waiting room, until I remembered that my last interviewer would be grilling me on the specifics of my AMCAS application, which I didn’t have access to at the moment. After thirty minutes of raking my brain for everything that I put on the application, I walked to my final interview, prepared to accept my fate.

A nice older man greeted me and offered to take my coat as I entered his office. We sat down and it began.

Him: So, remind me what all you did in highschool…

The interview continued in that fashion until we finished my third year at UGA.

Him: So that does it for college. You graduated early and took a year off. So what did you do?

Me: Ummm, actually I spent four years in college.

Him: I thought it was only three. You came in with a year’s worth of AP credits.

Me: Yes, but then I decided to do two majors and a minor, so I stayed for the whole four years.

Him: But you graduated in 2010 right?

Me: Yes, but I started in 2006.

Him: Right, three years.

At this point I was getting worried. I didn’t want to argue with or embarrass the person who had the power to decide my future, but I also wanted the opportunity to talk about all that I did in my fourth year. I opted to lay out the years that corresponded with my years at UGA and hope I didn’t come across as condescending.

Me: Okay, 06-07 was Freshman year, 07-08 was Sophomore, 08-09 was Junior, 09-10 was Senior, and now I’m taking a year off and working in a lab. (Then I took a deep breath and hoped for the best)

Him: Oh… That’s right, so what happened Senior year?

Hooray! The day was saved. The rest of the interview went off without a hitch and in no time I was enjoying lunch and the campus tour (and hoping against hope that I would get an email from them the next day).

Just as I was wrapping up my day in the lab a few weeks ago, a vision of untold beauty greeted me in my inbox. 

My first interview of this cycle (from a top 25 school no less)! It seemed my luck was improving.  I scheduled the interview and waited impatiently for the day to come.

The day before the interview I drove from Athens to Birmingham. Despite almost falling asleep on the road, thinking my car was about to lose a wheel (nothing was wrong with the Prius, it was the poor quality of a certain stretch of I-20), and having my credit card rejected at a gas station, the trip wasn’t too bad.  I checked into my hotel to find that I had a gigantic room. It was really two rooms: a lounge area with a bar, a desk, a couch and a big screen TV, and a bedroom with 2 queen size beds. (Do I need two queen sized beds, you ask? Absolutely not, but it’s what they gave me, and it was awesome.)

After getting a meal at an Indian restaurant by the UAB hospital, I holed up in my palatial room to go over my applications and look at some questions previously asked at UAB interviews (Thanks studentdoctor.net!).  It was a night full of coffee, college basketball, and nerves. For those of you who don’t know, I can be a bit of a worrier, so my nerves weren’t helped by the fact that it took me until 9 o’clock to realize that I was in a different time zone (awesome in that I gained an hour, but very worrisome as I wondered what other obvious piece of information I could have missed). Eventually I made it to bed, imagining everything that could go wrong the next day.

The Back-Story (Part 2)

Once I graduated, I took the obvious first step to begin my reapplication and went to Japan.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t logical or helpful, but it was a great way to clear my head and see a whole new part of the world. (I’ll probably talk about Japan later, in a series of posts tentatively named “Formative Events” (aka an excuse to talk about some amusing events from the past).)

I had already lined up a job for the next year, so, on my return to the states, I targeted what I thought was my weakest point: shadowing. I was given a small hint as to my weakness from the one interview I got the first time around. It went something like this:

Interviewer: So I see you don’t have much shadowing experience.

Me: Yes, but, I’ve talked to many doctors and done my research over the years, so I’m sure I want to go into medicine.

Interviewer: But how do you know unless you shadow?

Me: I have the ability to make an informed decision?

Interviewer: Okay, moving on. How much do you think your lack of shadowing will affect your application?

Me: I’m going to guess, “a lot?”

Interviewer: Okay. And, do you think that you’re ready to be a physician in light of the fact that you haven’t shadowed?

Me: Can we talk about something else now?

Therefore, I shadowed a few night shifts in the ER and spent a few days with an orthopedic surgeon. I can’t legally tell you exactly what I saw during those sessions, but suffice it to say that I saw a little bit of everything in the ER and a lot of nothing with the orthopedic surgeon.

Soon I began working as a laboratory technician in the lab that I had done research for during my undergrad years. My lab work has the distinction of being the only other thing talked about in my interview, and somehow, what should have been a positive conversation was twisted into a gut wrenching game of “phrase it the way I want it or you clearly don’t understand,” which sapped me of any confidence I had left after our shadowing discussion.

Interviewer: So tell me about your research.

Me: We are studying the host cell response to influenza. We have been screening the human genome using siRNAs to knockdown gene products in order to see the effect on influenza replication.

Interviewer: So what’s the goal of your project?

Me: We are hoping to find genes necessary for virus replication, which could lead to novel treatment strategies for the virus.

Interviewer: But what is the simple result you want to come from your work?

Me: … to find novel treatments for influenza infection?

Interviewer: But, if you were just talking to someone who doesn’t do research, what would you tell them you’re trying to do?

Me: ... come up with new ways to treat the flu?

Interviewer: No, as simply as you can, what is your research aimed at?

Me: … Keegan make people better?

Interviewer: Okay, I just wanted to make sure you knew why you were doing your research.

Since beginning to work full time, I have submitted my AMCAS and secondary applications. I have also been volunteering at Athens Animal Control and Butterfly Dreams Farms, and I am once again waiting on interviews.

(Disclaimer: Conversations may be slightly embellished, but I assure you that the general feeling remains.)

The Back-Story (Part 1)

During your senior year, all students intending to apply to med schools have to meet with the pre-med advisor so he can write a recommendation for you and offer guidance on your quest. I arrived at my meeting slightly early, and just as I sat down the advisor came out and ushered me in to his office. He looked at my file for a second and then asked:

So, if you got a 35 on the MCAT, where would you go?

Me: (After pausing to see if he was joking) I did get a 35 on the MCAT.

Advisor: No, I’m just asking if you did, where would you go?

Me: Ummm, no. I already took the MCAT, and I did get a 35.

Advisor: … Oh. Okay. Well, everything else looks good, so you can go just about anywhere you want.

The advisor and I chatted for a little longer and then he sent me on my way. It was great, the world was my oyster. I would be accepted to med schools in no time. Applications were a mere formality at this point.

I applied to a slew of top ranked schools and sat back to watch the acceptances roll in. The secondaries came, I filled them out, and waited for my interviews. And I waited. And then I waited some more. And finally, as I was beginning to panic, I received a phone call inviting me to an interview. It didn’t come from my first choice of school, but I was on the board now. I was back in the game. I was still going to dominate this whole process. Surely the other schools would recognize my obvious greatness and clear aptitude for med school.

No other interview invitations came, and I was placed on the wait-list at the one school that did interview me.

You should know that I have long held a suspicion that I have some horrible learning disability rendering me functionally incapable which no one has had the heart to tell me about.

The profound lack of response to my application to medical schools exacerbated my fear immensely. As I searched for the reason behind the lack of interest, my mind ran wild.

My advisor said I would be competitive everywhere. What happened? Did they learn about my disability? I always knew I wasn’t actually smart. Oh God, what’s wrong with me? Am I going to end up on the streets because nobody wants the burden of taking care of me with my condition which has rendered me unable to function in society?

At some point I figured that, in order to keep such a huge secret from me, my life would have to be either 1) a Truman Show-like farce or 2) a hallucination I have been having while legitimately disabled. 1 seems highly unlikely, and, if it’s 2 (also probably very unlikely), I almost certainly don’t have that much control and nothing really matters anyway.

I still knew I wanted to be a doctor, so I gathered myself together and began to prepare to reapply.

The Process

I’m sure many of you are blessed to not have the desire to become a doctor and therefore don’t know what the application process is like. Here is a look at what goes on:

After you take the MCAT, pass all of those classes med schools like, and convince a few professors that they actually remember you and should write a recommendation for you, you have to fill out the AMCAS (American Medical College Application Service) application. The vast majority of US med schools use this service and it seems like a great idea. The application is pretty involved, but you only have to answer one long essay question (Why do you want to be a doctor?) and they send your application and letters of recommendation to every school you indicate for a nominal fee (read hundreds and hundreds of dollars). And, that’s that.

Only that’s not that. Med schools then receive your application and decide to send you a secondary application. It used to be that med schools would weed out some applicants between the AMCAS application and the secondary, but I’m fairly certain that now the majority of schools simply invite everyone who is interested to fill out a secondary. Oh, by the way, that will run you roughly one hundred dollars per secondary.

Then the real weeding out process starts. Schools decide to invite a select group of applicants for an interview, and then you agonize for a few months before they reject or accept you.

The Search Is On

Simply enough, this is my search for something to do with my life (plus some odds and ends thrown in for good measure).

When I was a wee lad, I wanted to be a scientist. Archaeologist, Marine Biologist, Geneticist, Vulcanologist... you name a discipline in science and at some point I probably wanted to do that for a living. However, I quickly came to the realization that I wanted to be a doctor. So, for the past nine or so years, I have focused my life on that goal. Somewhere along the way, though, that plan seems to have come off the tracks.

I am currently reapplying to medical schools, but I am also staring into the abyss of "you're not going to make it to med school and you have degrees in Biology and Religion. Shit shit shit shit shit." It's not a situation I ever imagined I would be in, but here I am.

Whatever happens, you'll hear about it here as I attempt to make humor out of my shame. Feel free to offer suggestions or take bets on my final direction, because your guess is as good as mine.



P.S. If you know anyone on the admissions committee of a medical school, feel free to say, "Hey, there's this kid, Keegan Coleman, that you should keep an eye out for. He's pretty awesome/deserving/desperate." Or something like that. I have faith in your abilities to come up with a great way to sell me.