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Please submit answers to the following questions. Please limit your responses to approximately 500 words each.

Required Essay 1:
Yale School of Medicine values diversity in all its forms. How will your background and experiences contribute to this important focus of our institution and inform your future role as a physician?



Required Essay 2 (please select one of the following):

MD applicants: Please answer either one of the following questions
MD/PhD applicants: Please answer question 2 as it pertains to your proposed PhD research.

  1. While there is great emphasis on the physician-patient relationship, Yale School of Medicine also emphasizes the importance of training future physicians to care for communities and populations. Describe how your experiences would contribute to this aspect of the mission of the Yale School of Medicine.
  2. Research is essential to patient care, and all students at Yale School of Medicine complete a research thesis. Tell us how your research interests, skills and experiences would contribute to scholarship at Yale School of Medicine.



This section is optional. It should be used to bring to the attention of the Admissions Committee any important information (personal, academic, or professional) not discussed in other sections of your Yale Secondary Application.

Please limit your response to 500 words.

additional MD/PhD essay:

Write a statement (approximately 500 words) concerning:

  • Your reasons for wishing to undertake the combined MD/PhD program, rather than the MD program alone.
  • The specific PhD program that you propose to follow at Yale.
  • The strengths of that Yale graduate program and its faculty as they relate to your career goals.


Good luck to everyone applying!

Interview Feedback: Yale School of Medicine

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Hard to believe it's already time for another one of these threads. We MS1s just finished our first year last week and are now freshly minted MS2s headed into a relaxing summer of research. Feel free to message me with any questions you have about the interview, Yale System, life in New Haven, or whatever.

Good luck to everyone in this thread. I highly encourage you all to consider Yale for applications, and when the time comes, for your final decision.
 
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Hard to believe it's already time for another one of these threads. We MS1s just finished our first year last week and are now freshly minted MS2s headed into a relaxing summer of research. Feel free to message me with any questions you have about the interview, Yale System, life in New Haven, or whatever.

Good luck to everyone in this thread. I highly encourage you all to consider Yale for applications, and when the time comes, for your final decision.


Thanks for being willing to help out! Since you're at Yale now, chances are you had a lot of options to choose from when you made your decision! What drew you to Yale over other schools you were accepted to?
 
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Hard to believe it's already time for another one of these threads. We MS1s just finished our first year last week and are now freshly minted MS2s headed into a relaxing summer of research. Feel free to message me with any questions you have about the interview, Yale System, life in New Haven, or whatever.

Good luck to everyone in this thread. I highly encourage you all to consider Yale for applications, and when the time comes, for your final decision.

Could you also explain your experience with the Yale System? What exactly does it entail? Did you like it and how did it impact your learning?
 
This is a long post but I'm hoping to address some common things that are asked.

Thanks for being willing to help out! Since you're at Yale now, chances are you had a lot of options to choose from when you made your decision! What drew you to Yale over other schools you were accepted to?

The freedom entailed within the Yale System was the biggest draw for me because I'm a little older and like to do my own thing. I also had a positive experience on interview day - the students were cool and the faculty were accessible. Yale is a chill place where students carve their own path without the burdens of a paternalistic administration or a cutthroat environment. The attendance policy is generous, preclinical is truly Pass/Fail, there's no internal ranking of students, none of our preclinical stuff is graded except for final exams, there are no limits on how many students can get Honors on clerkships, there are no shelf exams during clinical years, and both research and outside activities are highly encouraged. I correctly perceived on interview day that this place is chill as hell.

Other contributing but not necessarily deciding factors for me were that there is guaranteed funding for research in the M1-M2 summer and a fifth year can be taken tuition-free to do whatever you want (about 50% of each class does this, usually for research time or a masters degree). At the time that I applied I was also interested in a particular field of research that is strong at Yale. We bring in a good handful of people who are interested in psychiatry, neuroscience, immunology, oncology, drug discovery, and several basic science disciplines, for example. The availability of research here and the supportiveness of the faculty are pretty incredible for those of us interested in academic careers.

Could you also explain your experience with the Yale System? What exactly does it entail? Did you like it and how did it impact your learning?

I answered this to some extent above. The Yale System allows me to really tailor my schedule and study strategies in my own way to maximize both efficiency and effectiveness in learning. A lot of this boils down again to preclinical grades being Pass/Fail and only the final exam of each unit counting toward our transcript. As long as I'm good to go by the end of a unit, it doesn't matter if I need to switch priorities day to day or even week to week. I have the extra time to do extracurricular stuff, shadowing, and research. I'm able to disappear once in a while if I want to go home, host a visitor, or go to a wedding, for example. That would all be a lot harder if I were forced to sit through a ton of mandatory activities all the time or had to deal with frequent exams/quizzes.

That said, Yale does offer weekly quizzes and periodic midterms that are entirely optional and are for you to gauge your own progress. A frequent question I get from people on here or during interviews is "given the independence inherent in the Yale System, do you ever feel like things are too unstructured?" The answer is no. There are lectures, workshops, labs, team-based learning, recommended readings, posted slides/notes, recorded lectures available by podcast, online exam question banks through the library, and the optional quizzes/midterms. Professors are also very responsive to questions and feedback if you reach out. The thing about the Yale System is not that it lacks structure, but rather that you get to choose how much of that structure you want to use. A handful of people attend everything and watch all of the lectures, and some people disconnect as much as possible. Most are somewhere in between. It's up to you.

Lastly, I'll note that after finishing clerkships, we have something like 17 months that each of us schedules entirely independently, including any electives, sub-Is, research time, dual degrees, dedicated Step study, or whatever that you want to do. This really lets you prepare to be as strong of an applicant as possible for your desired field because you're not tied down by a pre-determined curriculum, and you have more months of elective time due to our condensed preclinical curriculum.
 
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This is a long post but I'm hoping to address some common things that are asked.



The freedom entailed within the Yale System was the biggest draw for me because I'm a little older and like to do my own thing. I also had a positive experience on interview day - the students were cool and the faculty were accessible. Yale is a chill place where students carve their own path without the burdens of a paternalistic administration or a cutthroat environment. The attendance policy is generous, preclinical is truly Pass/Fail, there's no internal ranking of students, none of our preclinical stuff is graded except for final exams, there are no limits on how many students can get Honors on clerkships, there are no shelf exams during clinical years, and both research and outside activities are highly encouraged. I correctly perceived on interview day that this place is chill as hell.

Other contributing but not necessarily deciding factors for me were that there is guaranteed funding for research in the M1-M2 summer and a fifth year can be taken tuition-free to do whatever you want (about 50% of each class does this, usually for research time or a masters degree). At the time that I applied I was also interested in a particular field of research that is strong at Yale. We bring in a good handful of people who are interested in psychiatry, neuroscience, immunology, oncology, drug discovery, and several basic science disciplines, for example. The availability of research here and the supportiveness of the faculty are pretty incredible for those of us interested in academic careers.



I answered this to some extent above. The Yale System allows me to really tailor my schedule and study strategies in my own way to maximize both efficiency and effectiveness in learning. A lot of this boils down again to preclinical grades being Pass/Fail and only the final exam of each unit counting toward our transcript. As long as I'm good to go by the end of a unit, it doesn't matter if I need to switch priorities day to day or even week to week. I have the extra time to do extracurricular stuff, shadowing, and research. I'm able to disappear once in a while if I want to go home, host a visitor, or go to a wedding, for example. That would all be a lot harder if I were forced to sit through a ton of mandatory activities all the time or had to deal with frequent exams/quizzes.

That said, Yale does offer weekly quizzes and periodic midterms that are entirely optional and are for you to gauge your own progress. A frequent question I get from people on here or during interviews is "given the independence inherent in the Yale System, do you ever feel like things are too unstructured?" The answer is no. There are lectures, workshops, labs, team-based learning, recommended readings, posted slides/notes, recorded lectures available by podcast, online exam question banks through the library, and the optional quizzes/midterms. Professors are also very responsive to questions and feedback if you reach out. The thing about the Yale System is not that it lacks structure, but rather that you get to choose how much of that structure you want to use. A handful of people attend everything and watch all of the lectures, and some people disconnect as much as possible. Most are somewhere in between. It's up to you.

Lastly, I'll note that after finishing clerkships, we have something like 17 months that each of us schedules entirely independently, including any electives, sub-Is, research time, dual degrees, dedicated Step study, or whatever that you want to do. This really lets you prepare to be as strong of an applicant as possible for your desired field because you're not tied down by a pre-determined curriculum, and you have more months of elective time due to our condensed preclinical curriculum.

This sounds like a dream. Please Yale, love me.
 
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This is a long post but I'm hoping to address some common things that are asked.



The freedom entailed within the Yale System was the biggest draw for me because I'm a little older and like to do my own thing. I also had a positive experience on interview day - the students were cool and the faculty were accessible. Yale is a chill place where students carve their own path without the burdens of a paternalistic administration or a cutthroat environment. The attendance policy is generous, preclinical is truly Pass/Fail, there's no internal ranking of students, none of our preclinical stuff is graded except for final exams, there are no limits on how many students can get Honors on clerkships, there are no shelf exams during clinical years, and both research and outside activities are highly encouraged. I correctly perceived on interview day that this place is chill as hell.

Other contributing but not necessarily deciding factors for me were that there is guaranteed funding for research in the M1-M2 summer and a fifth year can be taken tuition-free to do whatever you want (about 50% of each class does this, usually for research time or a masters degree). At the time that I applied I was also interested in a particular field of research that is strong at Yale. We bring in a good handful of people who are interested in psychiatry, neuroscience, immunology, oncology, drug discovery, and several basic science disciplines, for example. The availability of research here and the supportiveness of the faculty are pretty incredible for those of us interested in academic careers.



I answered this to some extent above. The Yale System allows me to really tailor my schedule and study strategies in my own way to maximize both efficiency and effectiveness in learning. A lot of this boils down again to preclinical grades being Pass/Fail and only the final exam of each unit counting toward our transcript. As long as I'm good to go by the end of a unit, it doesn't matter if I need to switch priorities day to day or even week to week. I have the extra time to do extracurricular stuff, shadowing, and research. I'm able to disappear once in a while if I want to go home, host a visitor, or go to a wedding, for example. That would all be a lot harder if I were forced to sit through a ton of mandatory activities all the time or had to deal with frequent exams/quizzes.

That said, Yale does offer weekly quizzes and periodic midterms that are entirely optional and are for you to gauge your own progress. A frequent question I get from people on here or during interviews is "given the independence inherent in the Yale System, do you ever feel like things are too unstructured?" The answer is no. There are lectures, workshops, labs, team-based learning, recommended readings, posted slides/notes, recorded lectures available by podcast, online exam question banks through the library, and the optional quizzes/midterms. Professors are also very responsive to questions and feedback if you reach out. The thing about the Yale System is not that it lacks structure, but rather that you get to choose how much of that structure you want to use. A handful of people attend everything and watch all of the lectures, and some people disconnect as much as possible. Most are somewhere in between. It's up to you.

Lastly, I'll note that after finishing clerkships, we have something like 17 months that each of us schedules entirely independently, including any electives, sub-Is, research time, dual degrees, dedicated Step study, or whatever that you want to do. This really lets you prepare to be as strong of an applicant as possible for your desired field because you're not tied down by a pre-determined curriculum, and you have more months of elective time due to our condensed preclinical curriculum.

That's awesome thank you so much!
 
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My name is SSG Jeremy Hodges, I am one of the local medical recruiters in your area. If you have any questions please feel free to reach out to me. Best of luck to all of you!
 
Hullo. MS3 here, just getting back into the grind now after our short 2-week summer "break." There tends to be a lack of upperclassmen representation on these threads, for obvious reasons, so I'll try to fill the void again here now that I'm halfway through clerkship year. Good luck to everyone writing applications this summer!
 
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This is a long post but I'm hoping to address some common things that are asked.



The freedom entailed within the Yale System was the biggest draw for me because I'm a little older and like to do my own thing. I also had a positive experience on interview day - the students were cool and the faculty were accessible. Yale is a chill place where students carve their own path without the burdens of a paternalistic administration or a cutthroat environment. The attendance policy is generous, preclinical is truly Pass/Fail, there's no internal ranking of students, none of our preclinical stuff is graded except for final exams, there are no limits on how many students can get Honors on clerkships, there are no shelf exams during clinical years, and both research and outside activities are highly encouraged. I correctly perceived on interview day that this place is chill as hell.

Other contributing but not necessarily deciding factors for me were that there is guaranteed funding for research in the M1-M2 summer and a fifth year can be taken tuition-free to do whatever you want (about 50% of each class does this, usually for research time or a masters degree). At the time that I applied I was also interested in a particular field of research that is strong at Yale. We bring in a good handful of people who are interested in psychiatry, neuroscience, immunology, oncology, drug discovery, and several basic science disciplines, for example. The availability of research here and the supportiveness of the faculty are pretty incredible for those of us interested in academic careers.



I answered this to some extent above. The Yale System allows me to really tailor my schedule and study strategies in my own way to maximize both efficiency and effectiveness in learning. A lot of this boils down again to preclinical grades being Pass/Fail and only the final exam of each unit counting toward our transcript. As long as I'm good to go by the end of a unit, it doesn't matter if I need to switch priorities day to day or even week to week. I have the extra time to do extracurricular stuff, shadowing, and research. I'm able to disappear once in a while if I want to go home, host a visitor, or go to a wedding, for example. That would all be a lot harder if I were forced to sit through a ton of mandatory activities all the time or had to deal with frequent exams/quizzes.

That said, Yale does offer weekly quizzes and periodic midterms that are entirely optional and are for you to gauge your own progress. A frequent question I get from people on here or during interviews is "given the independence inherent in the Yale System, do you ever feel like things are too unstructured?" The answer is no. There are lectures, workshops, labs, team-based learning, recommended readings, posted slides/notes, recorded lectures available by podcast, online exam question banks through the library, and the optional quizzes/midterms. Professors are also very responsive to questions and feedback if you reach out. The thing about the Yale System is not that it lacks structure, but rather that you get to choose how much of that structure you want to use. A handful of people attend everything and watch all of the lectures, and some people disconnect as much as possible. Most are somewhere in between. It's up to you.

Lastly, I'll note that after finishing clerkships, we have something like 17 months that each of us schedules entirely independently, including any electives, sub-Is, research time, dual degrees, dedicated Step study, or whatever that you want to do. This really lets you prepare to be as strong of an applicant as possible for your desired field because you're not tied down by a pre-determined curriculum, and you have more months of elective time due to our condensed preclinical curriculum.


Could you expand upon the research experience between your MS1 and MS2? Are you working under an established researcher assisting his or her project or are you able to conduct your won research relatively autonomously?
 
Could you expand upon the research experience between your MS1 and MS2? Are you working under an established researcher assisting his or her project or are you able to conduct your won research relatively autonomously?

Both of those are possible. I secured an outside grant and am working on my own small project with a PI.
 
Members don't see this ad :)
Please submit answers to the following questions. Please limit your responses to approximately 500 words each.

Required Essay 1:
Yale School of Medicine values diversity in all its forms. How will your background and experiences contribute to this important focus of our institution and inform your future role as a physician?



Required Essay 2 (please select one of the following):

MD applicants: Please answer either one of the following questions
MD/PhD applicants: Please answer question 2 as it pertains to your proposed PhD research.

  1. While there is great emphasis on the physician-patient relationship, Yale School of Medicine also emphasizes the importance of training future physicians to care for communities and populations. Describe how your experiences would contribute to this aspect of the mission of the Yale School of Medicine.
  2. Research is essential to patient care, and all students at Yale School of Medicine complete a research thesis. Tell us how your research interests, skills and experiences would contribute to scholarship at Yale School of Medicine.



This section is optional. It should be used to bring to the attention of the Admissions Committee any important information (personal, academic, or professional) not discussed in other sections of your Yale Secondary Application.

Please limit your response to 500 words.
 
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Please submit answers to the following questions. Please limit your responses to approximately 500 words each.

Required Essay 1:
Yale School of Medicine values diversity in all its forms. How will your background and experiences contribute to this important focus of our institution and inform your future role as a physician?



Required Essay 2 (please select one of the following):

MD applicants: Please answer either one of the following questions
MD/PhD applicants: Please answer question 2 as it pertains to your proposed PhD research.

  1. While there is great emphasis on the physician-patient relationship, Yale School of Medicine also emphasizes the importance of training future physicians to care for communities and populations. Describe how your experiences would contribute to this aspect of the mission of the Yale School of Medicine.
  2. Research is essential to patient care, and all students at Yale School of Medicine complete a research thesis. Tell us how your research interests, skills and experiences would contribute to scholarship at Yale School of Medicine.



This section is optional. It should be used to bring to the attention of the Admissions Committee any important information (personal, academic, or professional) not discussed in other sections of your Yale Secondary Application.

Please limit your response to 500 words.
Ahhh new prompts??
 
Oh boy glad I didn't prewrite this one yet. At the very least their prompts are more similar to other schools though so should be a bit easier :)
 
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Anyone else planning to use the why Yale essay they wrote for the optional additional info essay?
 
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Anybody still waiting on this secondary?
 
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Any thought on which essay option is preferred (community service vs research)? I have about 50/50 on each one, so I can't decide on which one to choose.
 
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Any thought on which essay option is preferred (community service vs research)? I have about 50/50 on each one, so I can't decide on which one to choose.
I'd go for the one you have more passion for. I feel really passionate about community health so I chose that one.
 
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Any thought on which essay option is preferred (community service vs research)? I have about 50/50 on each one, so I can't decide on which one to choose.

I'm having trouble deciding which one too, because I have a decent amount of experience with public health research lol :/ I dont want to just highlight my community service (although I am passionate about it), but I dont want to start talking about research and then the adcoms get annoyed that I didn't write within the prompt. I'll have to think for a while about this one
 
I'm also split. Definitely more passionate about community service but I highlight that quite a bit elsewhere and was also planning on touching on it in my diversity essay. So I don't want to overkill on one subject. I'll probably take a stab at the research prompt and if it feels uninteresting I'll go for the community service one.
 
I don't think its community service vs research. I think in the first essay you can talk about your experience with community medicine and integrate public health research + community service experiences.
 
Can someone help me interpret this policy? I wanted to get a second opinion just to double check:

"U.S. Advanced Placement credits from high school do not themselves satisfy premedical requirements, but advanced college, university courses or institute of technology courses (for which students are made eligible by AP credits) may be substituted for introductory-level courses in each of these subjects."

So if I have AP Chemistry (4 credits) and Inorganic Chem II (4 credits), then I still haven't satisfied the 1 year of Inorganic Chemistry requirement (8 credits), have I?
 
Can someone help me interpret this policy? I wanted to get a second opinion just to double check:

"U.S. Advanced Placement credits from high school do not themselves satisfy premedical requirements, but advanced college, university courses or institute of technology courses (for which students are made eligible by AP credits) may be substituted for introductory-level courses in each of these subjects."

So if I have AP Chemistry (4 credits) and Inorganic Chem II (4 credits), then I still haven't satisfied the 1 year of Inorganic Chemistry requirement (8 credits), have I?

I would say that no, you have not, you'd need four more credits of advanced chem
 
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Can someone help me interpret this policy? I wanted to get a second opinion just to double check:

"U.S. Advanced Placement credits from high school do not themselves satisfy premedical requirements, but advanced college, university courses or institute of technology courses (for which students are made eligible by AP credits) may be substituted for introductory-level courses in each of these subjects."

So if I have AP Chemistry (4 credits) and Inorganic Chem II (4 credits), then I still haven't satisfied the 1 year of Inorganic Chemistry requirement (8 credits), have I?
I'm in the same boat...so much for applying I suppose
 
I'm in the same boat...so much for applying I suppose
These requirements are not required to apply. No school (to my knowledge at least), specifically requires courses to enable one to apply. Prerequisites you see on school bulletins must be satisfied before matriculation. You can 100% apply and be accepted if you're missing a few of the requirements.

Hint: Yale doesn't actually check for requirements even after you matriculate. Trust me because I had a couple missing and it does not strike me that anybody ever cared.
 
Could you expand upon the research experience between your MS1 and MS2? Are you working under an established researcher assisting his or her project or are you able to conduct your won research relatively autonomously?
How motivated are you? :shifty: It really depends on what you're doing. Most MS1s are incapable of designing their own bench experiments from scratch; on an intellectual and resource-level, it's just not reasonable, so you will 99% be working "under" someone, but still maintain some autonomy. On the flip side, most of those who put in the legwork should be able to get close, if not all the way, to designing their own clinical project in conjunction with attendings/residents; at worst, you can be an equal partner if not the leader; after all, you're the one with the most free time to hash out the proper data collection and methods workup anyway.

Those are the two most common type of projects MS1s are involved in. For the global/public health and health policy folks, there's nary anyone I know working on those projects who isn't the leader of their own work, given the relatively lower barrier to entry in getting something started in those fields.
 
I don't like these new prompts. The old one was better. So simple, just "Why Yale?" KISS. And why did that get taken out completely? Asking applicants pointedly exactly what they wish to do at Yale is one of the most valuable things to know from candidates. Very odd. Now we just look like a diversity hog along with the rest of the hoi polloi :asshat:
 
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hey guys! do you think talking about my love to music, playing in the band experience and music therapy exp in the hosital are diverse enough?
 
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Anyone else MSTP and hasn’t received the secondary?
 
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I'm curious to know how some of y'all approached the second prompt about research, specifically where it asks how our experiences would "contribute to scholarship at Yale School of Medicine". Specifically, how are you interpreting "scholarship"? As of now, I've discussed my past research experiences, fields of interest, and professional goals in research but I haven't mentioned too much about writing a thesis in medical school or med school specific programs. Thoughts?
 
Ughh... I know I shouldn't bother you all with this, but in my burned out state I think I made a grave (or tiny.. can't decide) error..

when talking about past applications, I said that I applied to med school for the class of 2016 and not 2020.... my brain just automatically filled in the phrase "entering" class of 2016. I re-read my essays so many times as did two mentors and none of us caught this.

is this as big of a deal as I'm thinking it is? thank you!
 
Ughh... I know I shouldn't bother you all with this, but in my burned out state I think I made a grave (or tiny.. can't decide) error..

when talking about past applications, I said that I applied to med school for the class of 2016 and not 2020.... my brain just automatically filled in the phrase "entering" class of 2016. I re-read my essays so many times as did two mentors and none of us caught this.

is this as big of a deal as I'm thinking it is? thank you!
not a big deal, if anyone asks just tell them what you meant.
 
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Anyone else MSTP and hasn’t received the secondary?
Me! I am still waiting, and glad to know I'm not the only one. Do MSTP secondaries tend to go out later or something? Because I'm still waiting on Stanford and Penn State in addition to Yale.
 
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Me! I am still waiting, and glad to know I'm not the only one. Do MSTP secondaries tend to go out later or something? Because I'm still waiting on Stanford and Penn State in addition to Yale.

It would seem to be that way. I'm also waiting on here and Stanford (+ UCLA)
 
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Finally got this secondary for MSTP
 
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Checking in to say I also got the MSTP secondary today!
 
Hi there! I'm also an incoming MS2 here with a youtube channel. Many people like to know stats about Yale School of Medicine, so I created a video regarding the stats of the incoming class of 2017. Hope you find it helpful.

 
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Hi there! I'm also an incoming MS2 here with a youtube channel. Many people like to know stats about Yale School of Medicine, so I created a video regarding the stats of the incoming class of 2017. Hope you find it helpful.


Your AMCAS full application walk-through video helped a lot when I was filling out my primary. THANKS!
 
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