Hey everyone! I hope you don't mind me trolling this board. I was accepted to UCDSOM last year, but actually had to defer because I encountered some unexpected delays in finishing my current degree. I'm extremely excited about meeting those of you who will be there next summer. In the meantime, I just wanted to try to provide some hope for the discouraged.
For starters, I applied really late. They received my primary in early September, sent me the secondary in mid-October, which I did not submit until mid-November. Interestingly, I was not complete until early December due to some glitch in the system saying that admissions had not received my letters of recommendation. Things seemed pretty hopeless, but then I both received an interview invite and completed the interview in mid-January. A couple of weeks later, I was placed on the wait list. After months of needless despair, I was ultimately accepted in mid-May...and even managed to get my deferral approved in early June.
Making my prospects even more dismal, I was by no means a stellar applicant. Numbers-wise, my GPA and MCAT scores were well below the average among admitted students at Davis. Embarrassingly, I even might have slightly pushed the boundaries of their 10th-90th percentile ranges for these measures. Moreover, though I am loath to clarify this, I was not a URM or socioeconomically disadvantaged applicant.
That being said, I was a mid-twenties non-trad applicant with some pretty cool activities. I think my performance on the MMI was okay; I think MilkandCereal and DocOpotamus gave really good advice earlier in this thread on approaching the MMI. What I believe kept me afloat as a Davis applicant was my secondary: I pored over their website for several days, reading about opportunities for med students, initiatives and activities that were happening school-wide, and familiarizing myself with the school's mission and values. In my secondary, I tried to highlight what I could learn by being a student at the school and how I would love to contribute to its endeavors. If you haven't submitted your secondary yet, you probably still have a chance.
For those who are still waiting for an interview invite or have not heard back post-interview, I think a handful of applicants had to deal with long wait-times before hearing back from admissions. Some students didn't get an interview invite until November, after being complete in August. A few applicants were taken off the interview wait list in January and I think were eventually accepted. Others who interviewed in November didn't hear back until March. One person interviewed in September and wasn't accepted until getting pulled off the wait-list in May. It all seems a bit random. But, based on last year's thread, there appeared to be some distinct periods when the admissions committee was particularly manic. A lot of people got final updates on their status around mid-November, mid-January, and mid-March. While I waited for my secondary and interview invites or chilled on the wait list, I witnessed some horrifying applicant blood baths. And so, from my personal experience, I found that no news was often good news.
I hope this takes some of the edge off the waiting game. If you haven't been rejected, then I think it's worth hanging onto that morsel of hope. Good luck!
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"Nobody can be uncheered with a balloon"
