2013-2014 Northwestern University Application Thread

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sscjlfc12 said:
The leadership for MSTP changed in 2011. Since then, it's been the same people. From what I've heard, there were some problems with the old administration, but the new leadership is awesome!
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Could you please provide more details on what was wrong with the old administration and how the new administration has improved on this? I would love to know more about the new administration.
 
rfenzo said:
Is anyone else now unable to access the secondary?
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+1

I was able to earlier, but now I can't logon. I'll email them tomorrow if it persists.

EDIT: I was able to open the window in an incognito window in Chrome. It may be an issue with cookies.
 
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MDLady413 said:
Same, but I'm okay with that-- for now. I kinda like the break from writing secondaries lol
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That's how I feel.. except that this is my last one and I kind of want to just get it over with.
 
Is there an actual limit to 250 words or can you go slightly over? It seems to allow me to go over the limit but I haven't finalized yet.
 
applyingtomed13 said:
Is there an actual limit to 250 words or can you go slightly over? It seems to allow me to go over the limit but I haven't finalized yet.
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Yes, it's a hard limit. I had 252 words and it made me correct the section
 
metview said:
no 2ndary yet, even checked spam🙁
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Same here. It's like what was the point of getting verified on day 1 when all the schools are sending them out at random.
 
Finally got the secondary this morning...I guess I'd better finish these essays soon.
 
How are you guys writing the stress management essay? I'm having difficulty differentiating between coping skills and problem solving skills.
 
YankeeBean said:
Not how I planned my Saturday. I thought if anything this would come on Monday..
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Am I the only one who still doesn't have it?

subtlepenguin said:
How are you guys writing the stress management essay? I'm having difficulty differentiating between coping skills and problem solving skills.
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Coping skills are watching a movie and playing music to forget about the stress. Problem solving skills are asking friends and family for advice and not overthinking your decision.
 
Yay! Finally got the secondary as of 8:30 this morning 🙂

I would get the email notification while on vacation though...lol
 
Is anyone having a hard time fitting everything into 250 word for the "fit" essay? I pre-wrote this one but it was 300 words (as per last years thread) and I've basically had to tear it apart and overhaul it just to get it to approach 250 words, but I feel like I just can't drive the message home in such little space.
 
So I still have like 7 more secondaries I need to do because i got them three weeks ago (fell behind ugh) and i was going to do this one next week but it seems from previous threads that Northwestern REALLY cares about submitting asap. How true do you guys think this is? Will it be okay if I submit this in a week or should I put this one at the top of my list and submit as soon as i can?
Thanks for your help
 
Meredith92 said:
So I still have like 7 more secondaries I need to do because i got them three weeks ago (fell behind ugh) and i was going to do this one next week but it seems from previous threads that Northwestern REALLY cares about submitting asap. How true do you guys think this is? Will it be okay if I submit this in a week or should I put this one at the top of my list and submit as soon as i can?
Thanks for your help
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I guess submitting early won't be an option for us who haven't even received it yet!!! :/
 
ewelling said:
I guess submitting early won't be an option for us who haven't even received it yet!!! :/
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sorry! I didnt mean to rub it in at all that i had received it (ps it had gone to spam for me). I just wanted to get a sense from anyone who previously applied if Northwestern is particularly concerned with the amount of time from receiving the secondary to submitting it.

I really hope you get yours soon!
 
Meredith92 said:
sorry! I didnt mean to rub it in at all that i had received it (ps it had gone to spam for me). I just wanted to get a sense from anyone who previously applied if Northwestern is particularly concerned with the amount of time from receiving the secondary to submitting it.

I really hope you get yours soon!
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Thanks! I'm just being impatient!

I would do a quality secondary and not rush, but yes the earlier the better. That probably doesn't answer ur question but just my 2 cents 🙂
 
Hey all, I just want to share some comments offered on the 2012-2013 Northwestern thread. A few M1 students voiced how unhappy they are with FSM's new curricula. Here is one poster who really sold me on not submitting a secondary for this medical school. Good luck to everyone else applying:

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.
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pyrrion89 said:
Hey all, I just want to share some comments offered on the 2012-2013 Northwestern thread. A few M1 students voiced how unhappy they are with FSM's new curricula. Here is one poster who really sold me on not submitting a secondary for this medical school. Good luck to everyone else applying:
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Wow. Thank you for sharing. Any current students want to share how or if any of this was changed for this coming year?
 
pyrrion89 said:
Hey all, I just want to share some comments offered on the 2012-2013 Northwestern thread. A few M1 students voiced how unhappy they are with FSM's new curricula. Here is one poster who really sold me on not submitting a secondary for this medical school. Good luck to everyone else applying:
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Hoping lots of people are turned off by Northwestern, because I still would give my left arm to attend despite this. NU is an institution I have long admired, and if I did not need to be so close to home during my college years, I would have gone to NU.
 
can people log in after submitting the secondary?
 
pyrrion89 said:
Hey all, I just want to share some comments offered on the 2012-2013 Northwestern thread. A few M1 students voiced how unhappy they are with FSM's new curricula. Here is one poster who really sold me on not submitting a secondary for this medical school. Good luck to everyone else applying:
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I was actually now looking through the last year's thread, because I was somewhat struggling with how I should answer the secondary prompts. And I came across this:

member281849383 said:
I, too, am an M1 at Feinberg and someone pointed me to this thread because of all the talk about the new curriculum. After reading the post by @NtsFrmUndrgrnd I felt the need to add another perspective. I actually started at FSM last year but for various reasons the year was interrupted. So I have perspective on what the curriculum was like, what it's like now, and can tell you my views on the changes. I will go into specifics, but I want to emphasize that despite the glitches/problems/etc. inherent with a new curriculum, I enjoy this curriculum SO much more than the previous one. I feel like I am getting a better education, the material is WAY more interesting, integrated, and clinically relevant, and truthfully, this curriculum has really enabled our class to bond. (Whether that's because we're complaining about this or that or because of the inherent structure of the curriculum, I don't know - probably both).

Specifics:
I agree with all of the positives mentioned in other posts. But I really want to stress how much better it is to have all the normal physiology/anatomy/etc. presented together with the pathophysiology. For one, it's a heck of a lot more enjoyable to study. It's hard to motivate when you are studying an organ's physiology in isolation. It's hard to see the relevance and a lot of times I was thinking, so what? But when you are learning the path simultaneously, the physiology just makes sense. It's not only more interesting, but honestly I think it eliminates some of the burden of memorization because you can think through the pathogenesis rather than memorizing that disease X is characterized by a, b, and c.

On top of that, it makes the clinical exposure we get so much richer. Last year, we would learn physical exam skills relevant to the organ we were studying. But how are you supposed to recognize, appreciate, and understand abnormal exam findings when you haven't learned the possible disease states it represents? I can tell you, it feels very superficial. We also have preceptorships this year. While I will say that everyone's experience is different (depending on what specialty their preceptor is, etc.), it's so cool to be able to walk out of science lecture and into the hospital where you actually SEE the disease you just learned about. Yes, M2s at every school get this experience. But we get it earlier. Finally, we have ~1.5 hours a week of clinical medicine lecture. One of these hours is called clinical correlations. A real patient comes in and talks about their experience with a disease we are learning about. I know I speak for many when I say it's incredible.

Now to the negatives.

We do have a lot of class that seems like nonsense. Honestly, most people are probably browsing the internet, looking at flashcards, or whatever during Health & Society. It feels like a lot of redundant material that does not require that much time to present. I whine like everyone else that it's required. But it's only 2 hours a week. They have scaled it back drastically from the beginning of the year.

In terms of Professional Development: the "corporate personality workshop" is truthfully a silly leadership lecture series. Do I pay attention? No. Do I wish I could leave? Yes. But it's maybe once a month. The rest of Professional Development I truthfully feel is similar to what you'd get at any other school (and I have friends at other med schools so this isn't coming from no where). Besides, we had ethics 2 hours a week last year. It's not some "fluffy nonsense" that was invented for this curriculum.

AOSC: I'll be blunt, it was poorly planned. The communication has been terrible and expectations are unclear. I would not, however, say that it is a joke nor would I say it will weaken our residency applications. There are rigid constraints and I know that has interfered with some people's projects. But so much of this is because it's the first year and honestly, the people running AOSC don't even really know what's going on. I believe most of this is due to the fact that it's the first year and stuff is going to go wrong. But you should know that many of these problems will be improved next year. And I'm really excited about my project.

I'm on one of the curriculum review committees and I will tell you that the faculty are listening to our complaints and striving to make positive changes. Are we going to get all the changes we want? No. Are some of the people who designed the curriculum too idealistic? Yes. But it's honestly because they care (cheesy, yes). They have spent years on this curriculum. They don't want it to fail. And I've read every one of my classmates' evaluations. @NtsFrmUndrgrnd completely misrepresents the overall sentiment.

Like I said, I am FAR happier with this curriculum than the last. I think it's making me a stronger student and will ultimately make me a better residency applicant and a better physician. Keep in mind that some of the complaints and frustrations that have been voiced are due to the fact that this is the first year of a new curriculum. I would bet that next year things will run a lot smoother.

If you don't read any of this post, read this. I was doing a focused clinical experience (shadowing experiences themed around the organ system we are doing/just did) with a cardiologist at the connective tissue disease clinic at Lurie Children's. I spent a lot of time with the nurse practitioner and a nurse (of 25 years) who was studying to be a nurse practitioner. She hadn't had much experience with CTDs and had a number of questions throughout the morning, some of which I was able to answer. At the end, she thanked me for my help. She said, "Now are you a resident?" I said, no, student. And she said, "4th year?"

Random, isolated incident but I think it's a good sign that the new curriculum (flaws and all) is preparing us well.
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Sure, many things would go wrong and ineffective since the curriculum is still quite new, but the benefits of having patho, physio, relevant clinical knowledge, AND a patient's perspective on the disease students just learned are quite extraordinary. I thought the first two years of medical school will be very stressful, but after reading this, I am actually looking forward to it if I get into NW.

And even the "useless" lectures are not that much occupying our study time, so perhaps if we bring our flashcards or study materials to study, then "the damage from attending such classes" might not be as big as we would expect.
 
I have not submitted the secondary, but cannot log in to the secondary app. Is everyone having this issue?
 
hopefulMD12 said:
I have not submitted the secondary, but cannot log in to the secondary app. Is everyone having this issue?
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I received the secondary this morning and I'm not having any issues logging in.
 
Finally got the secondary. Last one to be submitted - so glad to be done! 😀
 
Lya said:
I was actually now looking through the last year's thread, because I was somewhat struggling with how I should answer the secondary prompts. And I came across this:





Sure, many things would go wrong and ineffective since the curriculum is still quite new, but the benefits of having patho, physio, relevant clinical knowledge, AND a patient's perspective on the disease students just learned are quite extraordinary. I thought the first two years of medical school will be very stressful, but after reading this, I am actually looking forward to it if I get into NW.

And even the "useless" lectures are not that much occupying our study time, so perhaps if we bring our flashcards or study materials to study, then "the damage from attending such classes" might not be as big as we would expect.
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Thanks for posting this. I don't think I had read far enough in the 2013-2014 FSM thread to get to this comment. I don't want to misrepresent FSM by implying that the M1 sentiment is unanimously bad.
 
pyrrion89 said:
Thanks for posting this. I don't think I had read far enough in the 2013-2014 FSM thread to get to this comment. I don't want to misrepresent FSM by implying that the M1 sentiment is unanimously bad.
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Doesn't matter how many times I see it, but I always go to Flying Spaghetti Monster before Feinberg School of Medicine when someone writes "FSM"
 
Just submitted. This secondary was tougher than expected for some reason..
 
Lya said:
Just submitted. This secondary was tougher than expected for some reason..
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some reason = insanely short text fields with so many things to write about northwestern.
 
For those writing the MSTP secondaries—did you have significant overlaps between

"Discuss a current unanswered question in biomedical research that you find particularly interesting and what research you would like to see done to address it. (200 words)"

"Please describe your current research interest as you plan your research training. (400 words)"

I feel like I'm essentially writing the same thing?


Big N Tasty said:
Doesn't matter how many times I see it, but I always go to Flying Spaghetti Monster before Feinberg School of Medicine when someone writes "FSM"
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R'Amen!
 
Anyone know if FSM is receptive to in the area emails?
 
Amba said:
Yes, it's rolling.

Marked complete today via status change. No email.
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Marked complete today as well through both status change and email - the complete email was included with the fee receipt email.
 
The videos on FSM's website seemed to emphasize "inquiry and self driven" curriculum, and yet, from what the M1s wrote in last year's forum, it sounds like there is a lot of hand holding -- one even said it felt like middle school. Anyone else notice this inconsistency? I guess a lot of the interviews that are included in the videos were filmed before the new curriculum, perhaps? This is messing with my response to the first essay prompt.
 
Complete and under review as of this morning.

*Fingers Crossed*
 
My last secondary and the only one that was filtered as spam by Gmail. I had grown complacent because everything was getting through without any problems, then I check today and 75 emails back is the NW secondary, in between offers for natural male enhancement and a low rate mortgage...
 
Are people who are not URMs (i.e. sexual orientation, race, etc.) writing the diversity question? I don't want to sell myself short, but am not sure my diversity essay fits the question given that it doesn't discuss those topics.
 
fhg said:
Are people who are not URMs (i.e. sexual orientation, race, etc.) writing the diversity question? I don't want to sell myself short, but am not sure my diversity essay fits the question given that it doesn't discuss those topics.
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I did. I'm a non-trad that's been teaching in low-income communities, so I thought that might be applicable.
 
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