2012-2013 Mayo Medical School Application Thread

mayo,

let me in.

gracias

espagueti said:

mayo,

let me in.

Gracias

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+1

I'm not much of an active user on SDN, but I will stop by as often as possible to offer any help and advice to those applying this cycle. As an incoming first-year, I'm all too familiar with the motions that you're about to encounter. But trust me when I say this: Mayo's admission process is very transparent, which is something of a rarity as I'm sure you'll discover. There are also plenty of second, third, and fourth year students lurking on these forums who are more qualified to tell you about the school itself. From what I've learned during my interview and stay in Rochester, Mayo really lives up to its reputation as an incredible institution. The clinicians, students, curriculum, and opportunities in general create a supportive and nurturing environment that I just didn't find anywhere else. I feel fortunate to be part of this community now and I look forward to meeting/hosting many of you in the fall.

dadaism said:

I'm not much of an active user on SDN, but I will stop by as often as possible to offer any help and advice to those applying this cycle. As an incoming first-year, I'm all too familiar with the motions that you're about to encounter. But trust me when I say this: Mayo's admission process is very transparent, which is something of a rarity as I'm sure you'll discover. There are also plenty of second, third, and fourth year students lurking on these forums who are more qualified to tell you about the school itself. From what I've learned during my interview and stay in Rochester, Mayo really lives up to its reputation as an incredible institution. The clinicians, students, curriculum, and opportunities in general create a supportive and nurturing environment that I just didn't find anywhere else. I feel fortunate to be part of this community now and I look forward to meeting/hosting many of you in the fall.

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What would you say is the secret to getting into Mayo?

ccfman1991 said:

What would you say is the secret to getting into Mayo?

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil
Some oil, egg yolk, and either vinegar or lemon juice. That should do the trick.

What do you like about Rochester?

ccfman1991 said:

What would you say is the secret to getting into Mayo?

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This isn't exclusive to Mayo, but take your time putting together the primary application. Thoroughly review your personal statement, explain your activities in a clear and concise manner, and choose letter writers who can offer a meaningful glimpse into your character. Since Mayo doesn't ask for essays in the secondary, the primary application will be all the reviewer has to go on. As far as the interview and beyond, there seems to be an emphasis on "fit." Do your research and find out if the curriculum, class size, city, and other factors match up with what you're looking for.

vayntraubinator said:

What do you like about Rochester?

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Affordable living, solid biking trails, small community, and it reminds me a lot of the town I lived in when I was younger. If you do interview here, I suggest you spend at least a couple days in the city to get a better feel. I really enjoyed my time in Rochester.

So seeing as the class is 50 students, how diverse is it in terms of background? I don't mean in terms of ethnicity, but things like undergrad college. Are the majority of students from Ivy League's and top 10 universities or is there a good mix of state schools?

Is it true that attendance for lectures is mandatory?

Can anyone comment on their 1-year lab requirements for chemistry and organic chemistry? Most schools just require some lab component, but 1-year for both seems really intense. I've only taken a quarter of chem lab and a quarter of ochem lab...

From my experience applying 2 years ago, the norm was 1 year of orgo lecture and 1 semester of lab. However, it appears that Mayo has since changed their requirement to 2 semesters of lab unless there is a documented university limitation that prevents you from completing it (ie. it's not offered). I'm not sure for the reason for this change and I might be asking our director of admissions about it, because atleast from my experience, very few pre-med applicants complete 2 semesters of orgo lab. If you are concerned about it, you should consider addressing your particular situation with our admissions staff. I know that I was excused from 1 semester of INORGANIC lecture and lab because I took an accelerated genchem course that covered 2 semesters of material in 1 sem, so they are open to looking at individual situations, but know that that probably won't occur until well into the cycle. I would document in your "future courses" of AMCAS your intent to take those additional courses if you need to in order to matriculate.

wholeheartedly said:

Most of what I've seen for admissions requirements have 1 year of lab required for both bios and chems.

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I believe most admissions websites phrase it as:

Inorganic Chemistry- 1 year (including laboratory)

This does not imply a year of lab, and as far as I know most undergraduate institutions do not have a full two semesters of lab for chemistry. I know my school only has one semester of labs for gen chem and orgo.

Just called Mayo and the very pleasant admissions peeps informed me that if you can provide documentation that the undergrad institution offers only one semester of a specific lab then that should be fine. So if everyone in your school takes only one semester of chem lab youre ok.

DOCTAfoHIRE said:

Just called Mayo and the very pleasant admissions peeps informed me that if you can provide documentation that the undergrad institution offers only one semester of a specific lab then that should be fine. So if everyone in your school takes only one semester of chem lab youre ok.

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I also just emailed Mayo today and got an extremely quick, pleasant response. They said the same thing -- if your school only offers one semester of lab, show it, and they accept that. I love you mayo <3 <3 <3

BurntFlower said:

Is it true that attendance for lectures is mandatory?

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yes

dadaism said:

This isn't exclusive to Mayo, but take your time putting together the primary application. Thoroughly review your personal statement, explain your activities in a clear and concise manner, and choose letter writers who can offer a meaningful glimpse into your character. Since Mayo doesn't ask for essays in the secondary, the primary application will be all the reviewer has to go on. As far as the interview and beyond, there seems to be an emphasis on "fit." Do your research and find out if the curriculum, class size, city, and other factors match up with what you're looking for.



Affordable living, solid biking trails, small community, and it reminds me a lot of the town I lived in when I was younger. If you do interview here, I suggest you spend at least a couple days in the city to get a better feel. I really enjoyed my time in Rochester.

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Would you mind sharing your stats? Gpa, mcat? I'm jus curious but if you don't feel comfortable saying its ok.

I am very excited to apply to Mayo this year!

Good luck to everyone who's applying!

Compilation of information from last year's Mayo thread. I do not state I wrote any of this (main authors: Snuke, Nerday Shortay, Icanhazcheeseburger [sp], Wisco1, ect.) and do not guarantee accuracy of any statements. The views expressed are not in association with the Mayo Medical School (MMS) and can not be used as factual evidence.

However, I believe it is useful

Mayo does not have a secondary, unless they change from past years. You send in your primary, Mayo reviews it, and determines whether to request LOR's from you. Once they have requested your LOR's and you send them, you are reviewed again for an interview spot.

I'll leave the other questions about the small class size, Rochester, etc., for current students who would be more qualified to answer. I will say that from what I've learned through the interview process and second look weekend that Mayo is as awesome as it sounds on paper. Financial aid is great, opportunities are unlimited practically, curriculum is great with integrated "off" time between course blocks....could go on and on.
I'm not sure about a pre-sceen, but I do know that Mayo looks at MUCH more than MCAT and GPA. The second of half of your post is not exactly accurate. Everyone who applies gets a request for money, but this means nothing about your chances of interview. Once they receive your money, they begin to review your application (primarily activities) in deciding whether to request letters from you (you should not automatically send letters to them when you pay). Here's some numbers that have been posted in previous years' threads:

4000 apply
800 get LOR requests
250-300 get interviews
~72 are offered acceptances (including from alternate list)

personal statement is not read until after LORs are received.

42 MD-only spots available.
There's a minimum screen (LizzyM score of 60 = GPA * 10 + MCAT) to get the application looked at by Mayo. I assume that if you get the LOR request, you've passed that screen.
M1 schedule consists of morning lecture/lab from 8AM-noon. Then we have "Basic Doctoring" (physical exam skills and history taking, etc) 1-2 days per week in the afternoons from 1-5. The majority of the afternoons are free.

M2 year is reversed with daily lecture/lab in the afternoons.
Over the course of the first two calendar years, you have a total of 30 weeks of time alotted for selective. 18 of those weeks have to be spent doing a selective (=20 hours/wk of professional enrichment) and 12 of them are "free time". You can go home and do a shadowing experience if you want. Do your 20 hours of shadowing in the week and the rest of the time you can spend with family or do whatever you want.

I have only been in Rochester for a month now but I am not worried about it. Everyone here is very close knit and we hang out alot together. There is plenty to do in Rochester, and if you get bored, the Twin Cities are less than 90 minutes away.

We haven't really talked much about FL/AZ rotations yet, but from what I have heard you are able to do all of your rotations away if you choose, but that it is not a wise idea. The recommendation is to do the rotation in specialties that you're interested in in Rochester because that's where the "best experience" is. Do the ones that are less important to you away from Rochester. Many students, for example, will choose to do surgery rotation away if they don't have interest in surgery.
Oh man, where to start. Really, I just had an amazing incredible experience.

The interview day is long, but it seriously feels short. Everyone is incredibly nice, from admin people to MDs to students to random people on the street. All the students are blissfully happy (not just my hosts or the people running the tours. I think we met almost half the class, and not a single one - when pressed - could think of a major shortcoming to the school), and many of them turned down big names to go to Mayo. Amongst them: Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, UCSF, Wash U.

The interview day starts in the student center/admissions office. It's a small building across from the Gonda, rather out of place with the rest of the Mayo buildings because it's a renovated library. Very handsome inside, too. Gina is incredibly nice, and she did the orientation, which was largely the same video posted earlier and on the website. Then we met with the assistant dean of Academic and Student Affairs, then the Director of the Office of Diversity. Each of the talks were pretty short, which was nice. Then half of us had a 30 minute interview, the other half 30 minutes of down-time, then we switched. The ice was pretty much broken already because we'd met with our student hosts the night before to have dinner (and some of us helped the Birthday Baking Committee bake cupcakes!).

Then we had a tour of the Medical School. The Plummer building (library) is gorgeous, and we traipsed through the pedestrian subway, which is also very nice, and visited a few floors of the Gonda building. The Gonda building/Mayo Clinic is really quite majestic on the inside - marble and comfortable chairs everywhere, and someone was usually playing the grand piano. The peds floor is amazing - almost makes me want to be a pediatrician - and is designed for kids and to be very kid-friendly with curves and colors and low furniture everywhere.

Then lunch, then another interview/break, in which a few of us walked to the gym (which is a-MAZING and humongous) and had a tour (you get free membership your first two years). Then it was a short meeting with The Associate dean of Academic Affairs and a Dr. on the Admissions Committee chair.

Overall, in every possible aspect, it was incredible. Like I said, everyone is blissfully happy. One of my student hosts compared Mayo to a utopia, and it truly is of a kind. They make their own little world here, and they run it immaculately. Everything is literally for the patient.

And that's the key. Mayo-wear (what they call professional suit attire for when with patients) is to reduce the boundaries between patient and doctor. Everything is set up to make the patient more comfortable/for the patient's benefit.

The class size is, well, intimate. Everyone knows everyone and everyone's business, so if you aren't comfortable with that, that could be a problem. The small size, however, allows for opportunities that you can't have otherwise. In gross anatomy, they have a radiologist (because they CT the cadavers first), two surgeons expert in the field of whatever you're dissecting, and enough TAs to cover the rest of the tables. If you want to shadow someone, all you do is email them and set it up. There are a few set selectives, but people make up their own based on their interests, or if they want to travel somewhere, they do the hours of serving the underserved the first week and enjoy themselves the second week.

Some advice: Yes, Rochester really is small. Downtown takes up about a street. You're going to have to either get over it or don't interview. Really, it's small, and it takes about 90 minutes to get there from Minneapolis.

While the weather was great when I was here, it does get to -40 F.

When people are talking to you, pay attention. I had the Director of Diversity for my first interview, and I was able to use some of his key words and points as we talked.

The interviews are really really low stress. The only stress is what you put on yourself. Both of my interviews started with 'tell me about yourself,' and you get to pretty much direct it from there. They are anticipating 4000 applications for the 42 MD spots. They will give out 1200-1300 LOR, 250-280+ interviews, and 60-70 acceptances.

The last interview day is December 12th, and the first day they will look at interviewers and rank them is September 20th.
Gina said it would be more like just over 280 interviews this year. The 250-270 is a general amount the past few years, but this one will be a bit more.

We had no indication until we walked into the room and found our name cards with a Mayo folder that contained our itinerary for the day (along with some lovely resources).

I had one good interviewer, and one amazing, but pretty much everyone was very happy with who interviewed them. From what Gina was saying, some people fight to be scheduled to do interviews - especially the Director of Diversity, even though he has so much to do anyway, apparently.

And really, I just had this experience as I was eating out with my hosts - their friends would come up, see that we were prospectives, and the first thing out of their mouth was, 'you know, they treat us so well here.' It's delightfully amazing. Mayo will only send LOR requests if you move on to that step. That you have not received that email means only that: you have not moved on. If your primary is verified and your LORs sent out on the 30th, you have several weeks before you start to worry about if you're rejected, and even then - I know LeoGer waited 7 weeks between LOR request and interview.

Earlier, about 2-3 weeks was normal between fee request and LOR request. Now, later in the season, it might take even longer, as they have just started interviewing.

So yes, you will get a LOR request if Mayo wants to see them. Until they send that email, they're just looking at your stats and ECs, not even your PS.
Some are emergency medicine, pediatrics, medical clowning, two medical mission trips to Honduras, LGBT/HIV medicine in South Beach, Florida, psychiatry, research (x2), music therapy (upcoming), infectious disease. Mine are mostly medical, but the music therapy one is self-designed and mainly aimed at improving my repertoire/technique on the ukulele (no joke). I do play music every week in the main lobby at Mayo, but the school has nothing to do with this and it isn't technically medical in any way. I know other students have done writing selectives, volunteering selectives (not necessarily with medical organizations). You just have to explain what the selective will do for your career - bettering yourself as a person, even in non-medical ways, will ultimately make you a better doctor. They know that
Not acceptance/rejection emails. Mayo ranks each person following their interviews, then sends an email informing each applicant that they've been ranked. You don't know what rank you are (1-5, 1 being best), but I'm not sure how stringently they follow it, since they can pull a 2 in front of a 1 from the waitlist (leading people to believe that Mayo is comprising its class of people with certain characteristics, i.e. # athletes, # muscians, etc.)
To share an I love Mayo moment with you: I spent yesterday afternoon working with a professional actor on improv comedy skills...the idea being that extremely active listening (as is necessary for improv and scene handoffs) leads to a more successful first 20-30 seconds of entering a patient room. Several of my classmates are camping tonight to prep for a mass-casualty wilderness survival experience, another is delivering babies in rural Arizona, and one is on his way to a wedding this weekend. And, if it all works out, we'll come together next Monday to play another kickball game. What an absolutely fantastic way to study medicine...if you are going to learn 46,000 new words and phrases during the first two years of school you might as well have some fun along the way! oday during pediatric selective:

- Wake up, have coffee until 805am(others in the class doing this selective are out shadowing today in anything from gen peds to peds derm/ED/surg/etc.
- Meet Senior Sage (longitudinal geriatrics program) mentor for breakfast, interview and writeup afterwards--unrelated to selective but i had the morning free
- Lunch with peds residency director
- Neonatal resuscitation and umbilical line placement lab in simulator center from 1300-1530

...selective schedules vary widely though...so a more typical class day:

1st year:
8-12 a.m. is lecture/lab/group time. Some days we're out earlier.
12-1: Lunch/Free...usually time for interest group meetings, mentor meetings, attending grand rounds, interviewee lunches, etc.
1-5: Occasional afternoon activities (doctoring coursework, longitudinal development curriculum, volunteer programs, history taking skills, etc.)---on average over the year probably 2-3 afternoons a week have afternoons booked.

2nd year: essentially the reverse of above

3rd and 4th year: as with any medical school, mostly dedicated to time out on the wards so you could have days that are 24-36 hours long and others that are a basic outpatient clinic. Highly variable. Maybe. You might make it into the first ranking meeting after your interview, but if both of your interviewers are not present, you will not be discussed and you will not be ranked. This happened to me.

In addition, there might be a separate acceptance committee that meets at a different time than the ranking (like if they rank on Friday but accept on Thursday). Or they rank and accept at the same one. I have no clue about that, but it's a possibility.

Bottom line: you must be ranked before you can get a decision, and there's no telling when that will happen, could be a week, could be more. If you interview on the 7th, you'll definitely hear something before the end of the month, but it is possible that you'll miss the initial acceptances/decisions on the 17th. There's no way to tell at this point.

Very very cool program. Rochester is not too bad either, but then again I'm from a small town originally. Good luck everyone!

If I were accepted to Stanford, Yale, WashU, Cornell and Johns Hopkins, I'd pick Mayo.

Best of luck to everyone this cycle!

Anyone else having trouble accessing the site to pay the 100 bucks?

Goobs said:

Anyone else having trouble accessing the site to pay the 100 bucks?

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Yep. And judging by the fact that 12 people are viewing this thread right now, we're not the only ones

desphil said:

Yep. And judging by the fact that 12 people are viewing this thread right now, we're not the only ones

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yep, not working

404 - File or directory not found.
The resource you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.

we're all on the same boat

235 am. Received haha

Still down. Should probably have read this thread before emailing them.

Soapybubbles said:

Still down. Should probably have read this thread before emailing them.

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lol yeah down this morn for me as well

I emailed them about 30 minutes ago and just got an email to another link to pay the fee. They should be sending it out soon.

ceasefire said:

I emailed them about 30 minutes ago and just got an email to another link to pay the fee. They should be sending it out soon.

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could you link it?

secondary received (with the correct link) and submitted! my first one

forsparta said:

4000 apply
800 get LOR requests
250-300 get interviews
~72 are offered acceptances (including from alternate list)

personal statement is not read until after LORs are received

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That is not encouraging...

IRASNA said:

That is not encouraging...

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Tell me about it.....

If they don't read the personal statement until after the LOR then how do they narrow it down to 800. Do they read the rest of the application and leave out the ps? do they just screen mcat and gpa because I always hear that mayo looks at a lot more than that?

Syfte3 said:

Tell me about it.....

If they don't read the personal statement until after the LOR then how do they narrow it down to 800. Do they read the rest of the application and leave out the ps? do they just screen mcat and gpa because I always hear that mayo looks at a lot more than that?

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My guess is work experiences? That was a pretty hefty section.

Syfte3 said:

Tell me about it.....

If they don't read the personal statement until after the LOR then how do they narrow it down to 800. Do they read the rest of the application and leave out the ps? do they just screen mcat and gpa because I always hear that mayo looks at a lot more than that?

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Goobs said:

My guess is work experiences? That was a pretty hefty section.

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Yeah that was my concern. I feel like the essence of why I did everything was more in my PS than the work/activities section which was quite concise. They must look at numbers more so in this initial screen, in which case I might as well count myself out.

They are very selective with the type of student they want... the cohorts are very eclectic.

For example, in a past cycle, one SDN member found out the he was rejected because he didn't exhibit enough community service efforts.

As you said, while leaving the PS out of primary consideration renders a gaping hole in an applicant's story, Mayo has a pretty small admissions dept and I imagine this lets them increase their efficiency by cherry picking the apps with the demographics/activities they want first.

Get ready for the emails to arrive at approximately 2:30am.

Good luck, everyone!

Just received the request for LORs email from Mayo, at 1:35 am

LittleDandelion said:

Just received the request for LORs email from Mayo, at 1:35 am

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Odd time :O

What time did you submit your payment?

Nice, just got the LOR request ten minutes ago! 1:32 CST

i received the letters email as well

riddler said:

Odd time :O

What time did you submit your payment?

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I have the AMCAS fee waiver, and got the confirmation email from Mayo that they got that info from AMCAS yesterday. Now that you mentioned it, I just checked and realized that email was also sent at 1:35 am, haha.

I need to wait for Mayo to email me to pay them right? Only once I pay them will I get the LOR request.

I am AMCAS verified and have gotten secondaries from other schools. Does the fact that I am applying MD/PhD make a difference?

for those who got the lor request, do you mind posting your stats.?

LOR request received.

3.85 cGPA, 3.76 sGPA, 33O