Congratulations! What a quick turn around from your interview date. What do you think made the difference? Was there one or two things that really stuck out in your application or interview?
Yeah! I was very surprised by how fast they got back to me. I had tried hard to put it out of my mind until March, and getting the call today was a very nice surprise.
As far as things that made a difference, both of my traditional interviews were with physicians from the field that I'm interested in and that I have spent 6 years doing research in. I don't know if they designed it that way, but it helped break the interview mold, and I left the traditional interviews feeling very good. For the multiple minis, I
highly recommend taking a look at the University of Washington's online bioethics course (
https://depts.washington.edu/bioethx/topics/). I read through it and the case studies that come with each section, and it really prepared me well.
Another thing is that I was a reapplicant. I wasn't even offered an interview at Utah last year, and when I got my rejection, I asked admissions for feedback. The feedback came directly from Dr. Chan himself, and it was very detailed. The only catch is that they can't release it directly to you. You have to have your pre-med adviser request it and then meet with the adviser to go over it. If you are an out of state student, don't worry, they will work with out of state schools (I was in Arizona when I requested feedback). I really focused on improving the areas of weakness presented by Dr. Chan in last year's feedback (average volunteering hours and a personal statement that wasn't very engaging).
For anyone who fails to get in this year, I highly recommend requesting feedback and following through on it. The feedback on its own is valuable, since it comes directly from the dean of admissions (this is honestly amazing, since most schools flat out refuse to give you feedback at all), but they also keep track of people who were rejected in the past, requested feedback, and took measures to improve.
Finally, really pay attention to your writing and show your personal statement to as many people as possible. I was a cell biology major and have done research for 5 years after graduating, so the only writing I've done in the past 7 years is scientific writing. I honestly hate personal writing and hate sharing it with people, but I sucked it up and showed it to my friends, family, colleagues.. basically anyone who said they could look at it for me. I asked them to make sure that everything I included in my statement told them something about myself and my journey to the medical field. I recommend finding a few people that don't know you that well and get them to look at it too. A lot of my close friends and family looked at it and said it was good as it was because they know me already and they like me (hopefully). It was the people who didn't know me quite as well who could point out where the story lost them, and I think those people were more likely to criticize in general. It was a long process, but I was really proud of the end product and I felt like it represented me very well. Also, I spent a lot of time on writing about the AMCAS activities list in the primary application. Don't just explain the responsibilities of each activity you list. Explain why you did it and what you learned from it.
I hope this information is helpful, and not too much of a wall of text. I got a bit carried away.
