2012-2013 Northwestern University Application Thread

Discover Your Odds of Getting into Medical School
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If you didn't get anything by now, you are rejected right T.T
 
I'm actually pretty surprised that I got waitlisted. Also a little paranoid--I hope that there isn't some aspect of my application, such as recommendations, that is lacking unbeknownst to me. Isn't their acceptance rate about 65% past the interview stage? I'll likely withdraw, since I already have an acceptance at great (if not slightly better) school anyway, but still a lil freaked out.
 
ACCEPTED!!!!!!! First acceptance feels goooooooooooooooooooooooooooood.

Check your spam folders!!!!!!!!!!
 
also got alternate list
is alternate list end of the road for feinberg or is there still genuine hope...😕
 
accepted..!!!!..deferred 2 weeks ago...interviewed 1/23
 
zebrafisher said:
ACCEPTED!!!!!!! First acceptance feels goooooooooooooooooooooooooooood.

Check your spam folders!!!!!!!!!!
Click to expand...

+1

Accepted but the email went to gmail spam. That's pretty freaky. Now I am going to spend the morning reading the rest of the emails in the spam folder...

Interviewed 1/28/2013

Thanks SDN, I wouldn't have known to check otherwise!
 
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Is there anyone who still didn't get anything? even in spam folder?
 
ACCEPTED!!! Interviewed 1/30. E-mail went to spam folder in gmail too, weird.
 
Oh my god. First acceptance!

Email was in my spam mailbox!
 
Accepted!! Yeah, mine was in the spam folder of my gmail account!
 
Also accepted today! Found it in my spam box. II 11/28

Good luck to all those still waiting!
 
So if we haven't heard today, is tomorrow a reasonable expectation?
Plus, were there any bad news mailed out today? or it's all coming later too 🙁
 
Accepted OMG and thank you all for the warning about the spam folder. I found the email there too.
 
Still waiting here too... WHAT DOES IT MEAN?!
 
Same here. Hopefully it's not waitlist and acceptance by email and rejections by snail mail. Rejection plus the torture of waiting to get rejected, that's the very definition of cruel and unusual punishment. It would be like getting dumped, but the girl/guy never bother to tell you, and you have to hear it from a friend a week later ... Clearly, I am a little pissed off at this point.
 
TheBlueKnight said:
Same here. Hopefully it's not waitlist and acceptance by email and rejections by snail mail. Rejection plus the torture of waiting to get rejected, that's the very definition of cruel and unusual punishment. It would be like getting dumped, but the girl/guy never bother to tell you, and you have to hear it from a friend a week later ... Clearly, I am a little pissed off at this point.
Click to expand...

Definitely don't think they'll be doing anything by snail mail, they already sent mass rejections through e-mail.
Maybe they're just releasing decisions in waves to not crash their systems? (optimistic view :/)
or they're saving the rejections for the end (pessimistic view 🙁 )
 
colorfulfishies said:
Definitely don't think they'll be doing anything by snail mail, they already sent mass rejections through e-mail.
Maybe they're just releasing decisions in waves to not crash their systems? (optimistic view :/)
or they're saving the rejections for the end (pessimistic view 🙁 )
Click to expand...

I want to go with the optimistic view but it seems that from the previous year's threads, people who don't get accepted or waitlisted only get rejected a few days later....
 
Does anyone know what Feinberg's waitlist movement is like?
 
Rejected as well.... so confused. Thought this was my best interview... Thank god I have an acceptance at my top choice.
 
Im sorry 🙁((( not really sure what they are looking for either, but at these top tier schools nothing is guaranteed even if you are a spectacular applicant and will make a great doctor! (which I'm sure all of you are)

are your rejections via email or are we inferring at this point?
 
Puddlesauce said:
Im sorry 🙁((( not really sure what they are looking for either, but at these top tier schools nothing is guaranteed even if you are a spectacular applicant and will make a great doctor! (which I'm sure all of you are)

are your rejections via email or are we inferring at this point?
Click to expand...

aww thanks, that feels better
e-mail via spambox, good luck
 
0953920 said:
Does anyone know what Feinberg's waitlist movement is like?
Click to expand...

During my interview, the students indicated that there is quite a bit of movement. I think in the end around 40-50% of interviewed students get accepted. If I were you, I would send a strong letter of interest and keep hope alive!
 
Does anybody know where I could find more information about the MD/MM program? Scheduling (how much if at all will it interfere with MD coursework), cost, students' perception of the program, etc?
 
dysentery said:
Does anybody know where I could find more information about the MD/MM program? Scheduling (how much if at all will it interfere with MD coursework), cost, students' perception of the program, etc?
Click to expand...

I'm very interested in this as well but I can't seem to find any official reference of it from Feinberg or Kellogg's website besides a really obscure URL on the Kellogg website and Wikipedia.
 
Ok guys several things I've seen as I have scrolled through this forum.

I'm an M1 at Feinberg right now, just to clarify.

1) Concerning the MD/MM program that is being spoken about above. Do you mean the MD/MBA one? If so, its kind of defunct. It was really designed for the old curriculum, with the masters to be completed between the third and fourth year, but doesn't fit as neatly into the new version. It is a program run by Kellogg, not Feinberg, and I have heard you need to have prettty extensive business experience to be considered. I would recommend taking a leave of absence for a year and getting it somewhere else (or applying separately to Kellogg).

If you pursue a dual degree, you klep out of the AoSC requirement, but, unlike the MD/MPH program that is run through Feinberg, there is no way to prospectively guarantee your admission to Kellogg, so you'll have to do AoSC anyway.

2) For all of you guys that were disappointed by a wait-list appointment, don't lose hope - I got off the waitlist so its still very possible. Keep expressing interest and sending updates/maybe meet with a premed advisor and have them point to weaknesses in your AMCAS application, etc. that could be addressed in a letter.

3) Onto the curriculum (sad face). Lets break this down:

Positives:

Organ based science lectures are awesome. You learn about all aspects of the system. The pace is rough since the preclinical years were shortened by several months, but you can really synthesize information in a way that probably wouldn't be possible under the traditional schema.

You are immersed in clinical scenarios from the first week of you're M1 year in both preceptorships (working at clinics with mentors) and in technique sessions where you learn exam skills every week. People say my class is already ahead of the M2's in terms of clinical skills, and I enjoy being in the environment.

Location is awesome, as it has always been. Chicago is really cool.

Negatives:

There is so much crap in the new curriculum it isn't funny. We have two components of the curriculum called Health and Society (Public Health nonsense) and professional development (its hard to articulate how pointless this is, but its virtually a corporate personality workshop dribbled over two years, with some clinical ethics mixed in that every med school does). Not that either of these things aren't given to you at all medical schools, but they are farrrrr overdone, and I will echo my classmate above's comments. They keep us in class way longer every week for this stuff, and I can't help but feel this really takes away from our time and ability to actually learn the stuff we need to know, and fundamentally understand it in a way that will be clinically useful.

The administration, while all nice people who are concerned with bettering the school, really have a bizarre way of looking at things. TBL's (team based learning) are pointless sessions where no one learns anything and they're trying to make this a bigger part of the curriculum. Plenaries, essentially a class session about nothing every week, are such wastes of time I can't even begin to describe the extent. Furthermore, we have to do feedback on EVERYTHING - to the extent that it is onerous, yet nothing changes.

AoSC is a joke. We have five weeks during the summer to try to scrape together something resembling real research, and its actually interfered with most of my classmate's real research interest because of teh financial and temporal constraints it places on us. All of this extra fat in the curriculum is really hurting our abilities to explore our real interest in research, shadowing, etc., and I feel like we will have weaker residency applications as a result (at least on a classwide scale).

The real problem is that the people who planned the curriculum are too idealistic. A lot of the negative changes probably sounded great in a boardroom/in theory, but when put into practice are huge wastes of time, and, in my opinion (echoed by many in my class) detracting from our medical educations.

The attendance policy is anathema to what any person with half a brain would expect at a medical school. The only not required classes are 1) science lectures and 2) medical statistics, or, as I like to call them, things you actually need to know to be a functioning doctor. The bs parts of the curriculum are required attendance and will cut into your study time. But hey, as long as I know the social determinants of health status, I'll get by, right?


In saying all this, have I enjoyed Feinberg? Yeh, and I really like my class, but be prepared to be in somewhat of a war with the administration in trying to learn what you actually need to know.
 
NtsFrmUndrgrnd said:
Ok guys several things I've seen as I have scrolled through this forum.

I'm an M1 at Feinberg right now, just to clarify.

1) Concerning the MD/MM program that is being spoken about above. Do you mean the MD/MBA one? If so, its kind of defunct. It was really designed for the old curriculum, with the masters to be completed between the third and fourth year, but doesn't fit as neatly into the new version. It is a program run by Kellogg, not Feinberg, and I have heard you need to have prettty extensive business experience to be considered. I would recommend taking a leave of absence for a year and getting it somewhere else (or applying separately to Kellogg).

If you pursue a dual degree, you klep out of the AoSC requirement, but, unlike the MD/MPH program that is run through Feinberg, there is no way to prospectively guarantee your admission to Kellogg, so you'll have to do AoSC anyway.

2) For all of you guys that were disappointed by a wait-list appointment, don't lose hope - I got off the waitlist so its still very possible. Keep expressing interest and sending updates/maybe meet with a premed advisor and have them point to weaknesses in your AMCAS application, etc. that could be addressed in a letter.

3) Onto the curriculum (sad face). Lets break this down:

Positives:

Organ based science lectures are awesome. You learn about all aspects of the system. The pace is rough since the preclinical years were shortened by several months, but you can really synthesize information in a way that probably wouldn't be possible under the traditional schema.

You are immersed in clinical scenarios from the first week of you're M1 year in both preceptorships (working at clinics with mentors) and in technique sessions where you learn exam skills every week. People say my class is already ahead of the M2's in terms of clinical skills, and I enjoy being in the environment.

Location is awesome, as it has always been. Chicago is really cool.

Negatives:

There is so much crap in the new curriculum it isn't funny. We have two components of the curriculum called Health and Society (Public Health nonsense) and professional development (its hard to articulate how pointless this is, but its virtually a corporate personality workshop dribbled over two years, with some clinical ethics mixed in that every med school does). Not that either of these things aren't given to you at all medical schools, but they are farrrrr overdone, and I will echo my classmate above's comments. They keep us in class way longer every week for this stuff, and I can't help but feel this really takes away from our time and ability to actually learn the stuff we need to know, and fundamentally understand it in a way that will be clinically useful.

The administration, while all nice people who are concerned with bettering the school, really have a bizarre way of looking at things. TBL's (team based learning) are pointless sessions where no one learns anything and they're trying to make this a bigger part of the curriculum. Plenaries, essentially a class session about nothing every week, are such wastes of time I can't even begin to describe the extent. Furthermore, we have to do feedback on EVERYTHING - to the extent that it is onerous, yet nothing changes.

AoSC is a joke. We have five weeks during the summer to try to scrape together something resembling real research, and its actually interfered with most of my classmate's real research interest because of teh financial and temporal constraints it places on us. All of this extra fat in the curriculum is really hurting our abilities to explore our real interest in research, shadowing, etc., and I feel like we will have weaker residency applications as a result (at least on a classwide scale).

The real problem is that the people who planned the curriculum are too idealistic. A lot of the negative changes probably sounded great in a boardroom/in theory, but when put into practice are huge wastes of time, and, in my opinion (echoed by many in my class) detracting from our medical educations.

The attendance policy is anathema to what any person with half a brain would expect at a medical school. The only not required classes are 1) science lectures and 2) medical statistics, or, as I like to call them, things you actually need to know to be a functioning doctor. The bs parts of the curriculum are required attendance and will cut into your study time. But hey, as long as I know the social determinants of health status, I'll get by, right?


In saying all this, have I enjoyed Feinberg? Yeh, and I really like my class, but be prepared to be in somewhat of a war with the administration in trying to learn what you actually need to know.
Click to expand...

Hi, new to SDN and had a few questions.
How much time is devoted per week to health and society and professional development?
How about tbl?

Why do you feel like asoc is interfering with research? Wouln't it be possible to work pick a project that interests you and then just continue with it during the 5 weeks of summer?

Also, could you give a sample of a week's schedule?

Thank you
 
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Hey ntsfrmundrgrnd (or any NU med student on this forum!), do you think you could outline a sample week's schedule as an M-1?
 
The fact that two students have been so openly disappointed and critical of the new curriculum worries me if I were to get in off the wait list. Especially since the complaints seem to be mainly about having too many pointless activities with mandatory attendance. Students in most other school-specific threads seem to only have great thing to say about their school.


Oh we'll, who am I kidding I'm not getting in anyways, at least this makes me feel a little better about that fact :laugh:
 
Yeh of course. I'll do all of the above sometime in the next two days. St. patty's day is today and we have test coming up so I'll be tied up, but will get to it when I am able
 
Health and Society is 2 hours per week. It used to be 4, but then many students told the administration that they didn't find the 2 hours of small group sessions to be worthwhile, so they listened and reduced it down to 2 hours after our first unit (which was 14 weeks).

Professional Development floats around here and there (PD is a mix of many things: it's a mix of lecture and small group discussions on topics of medical ethics, AOSC, leadership, teamwork, personal awareness, etc), and are often 1h per week. Sometimes 2h per week, but if so, 1 of those hours is medical ethics, which I believe is pretty fundamental...

TBL depends heavily on the unit. I would say that we have 1 or 2 TBL sessions (each one being 2h) per unit (which nowadays with the organ system is 4-5 wk long). TBL made a lot of headway in terms of the administrators realizing what works and what doesn't work, and from talking to my classmates, people found the more recent ones to be quite helpful, actually...

(I don't understand what the previous comment about AOSC interfering with research is about. We are free to spend all 9 weeks of our summer doing research if we want to, as well as spend time during 1st and 2nd year participating in research... so it's really what you make of it)

How last week's sample schedule was:

Monday:
8-10am: TBL
10am-11:30am: clinical medicine lecture on Health Literacy
1-3pm: clinical skills session with standardized patients OR your preceptorship at a clinic

Tuesday:
8-10am: science lectures
10am-noon: PBL
1-3pm: Health and Society
3-4pm: medical ethics ("PD")

Wednesday:
8-11am: science lecture

Thursday:
8-10am: science lecture
10am-noon: PBL

Friday:
8-10am: science lecture
10-11am: plenary
11am-noon: lecture on leadership ("PD")

I really think the new curriculum is what you make out of it. A new curriculum will of course have glitches (I heard that another top 20 med school who had a curriculum shift in the past 10 years forgot to include the entire Reproductive Unit on their curriculum during the first year. As far as we know, FSM hasn't made that big a mistake).

I think it's also a problem of expectations. When our class were interviewing, we heard about FSM from the current M2's point of view (who are still in the older curriculum). So I admit, we got a different advertisement than what we were really going to get. Believe it or not, they had less mandatory class time, so I think a lot of M1's came here expecting more free afternoons and were disappointed. That won't be the case for you guys.

I really think that you shouldn't be swayed away from FSM because of this... It may seem to some people like we have a lot of "crap in the new curriculum" and a lot of mandatory classes, but might I remind you how little science lectures we have. So I think in comparison, it feels like we have a lot more of everything else. But really, count how many hours of PD or HS we had last week (which is pretty similar to past weeks' schedules). And I don't even mean to suggest that PD and HS are pointless like the other student suggested. I really warn you against coming to FSM if you truly feel that learning about community or public health, discussing dialysis distribution and global shortage, discussing medical ethics, or an occasional lecture on leadership and teamwork (really, 1 hour every 2-3 weeks) is that big of a "waste of your time."

I talk to students in other med schools, and they also have TBL, equivalents of Health and Society... I think you will find complainers at any school you look at, and it's a matter of how vocal they are. You guys have heard from like 3 different people in our class, out of 166. That's not a great sampling size!
 
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My friend - the current medical ethics sessions are empty rehashes of what we had in foundations, it's really pointless - though still only an hour - an hour here, an hour there, and whoops: half your week is gone. Like you said, we don't have many science lectures - this is the inherent problem many of us find with the curriculum. OH WAIT, medicine is based on science? Who knew, who knew?

Concerning AoSC, you also can't tell me the funding issue is more than a step away from blatant deception on the part of the administration. The reasons it interferes with what I call ideal research circumstances are: (1) The time frame is restrictive and not flexible, though like my classmate said, you can somewhat mitigate this by devoting more of your dwindling free time to it - many of the upper faculty could give a **** about "FSM 3.0" and aren't willing to play ball/babysit within the AoSC boundaries. The current line is actually that the only people who support AoSC are the ones who don't even do research, and the ones that do will quickly admit it will probably be gone within 3 years. (2) The structure of it, with having to pose a research question that is very specific, very early on, is not feasible for most projects when you became vaguely familiar with the field 2 weeks after meeting with a professor. Additionally the logistical mess involved couldn't have gone over your head this year. I have had multiple mentors admit to me that there isn't enough allocatable time to do well on tests, really sink your teeth into research, and explore a lot of the other aspects of medicine that one would like in the preclinical years. Its just really frustrating that hurtles of insignificance have been thrown in our path for no good reason. In some ways it does kind of feel like they are forcing us into primary care, or trying too, and many of our classmates have said that.

Now, we need to keep this in perspective: all of this is a big trend in medical education. It is happening at many other schools and will continue to become even more prevalent. If you were interested in Feinberg before reading this forum, my advice would be that you should still be. You really can make it work, especially if you're willing to sacrifice more of your social life for it. Moreover, it really will go much more smoothly for next year's class, I can guarantee that, and hopefully the babying bull**** will stop eventually. I am happy here and I would make the decision to come again - you will receive a great medical education: however, that doesn't mean you shouldn't have a spine about what is going on - it's our money, our future, and our priorities that are at stake.
 
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