(Sorry everybody for spamming, I've been away for a bit since my wife and I had a baby. She's pretty cool, you should babysit)
There was a question a while back about what my thoughts were about Albany in general, but I can't seem to find it to quote, but here goes:
To be completely honest I don't believe that it would have been the best fit for me. That is not to say it was an easy decision to choose one school over another. Obviously it would've been killer to have had the opportunity to have such a diverse patient-base at the only level 1 trauma center for a couple dozen counties. Their simulation center was pretty impressive as well. Also the staff was suuuuper accommodating over the phone and in person. It's definitely not a bad place to go, that's for sure.
As for the cons: The building looked... not too great on the inside. I know that aesthetics is pretty bottom-of-the-barrel for reasons to turn down an acceptance, but seeing as I was going to pay the same tuition for a much better-looking facility, I decided to go with the other option I had. Additionally, they will NOT budge on financial aid scholarships. Their position is "you will have the opportunity to apply for scholarships after first year" which is not the type of gamble 4-months-ago freak7 could take. If you're thinking about leveraging another acceptance against AMC, save your phone call and time. Also, I had the opportunity to ask a few of the students (who all seemed super great and candid btw. If you go here I'm sure you'll love your classmates) why they chose AMC and every single one said something to the effect of "oh it's the only place I got in". That is a PERFECTLY REASONABLE reason, however as I was already holding another acceptance, it scared me a bit. Furthermore (and this is suuuper nitpicky) all the food was served in these awkwardly-sized plastic cups, the kind that you'd expect to get your ketchup in. It felt like an episode of Seinfeld where George and Jerry would be arguing over whether or not it'd be ok to take 2 cups of something you think you'd really like, all while the pressure to move along because there are 15 people waiting behind you who are hungry too.
Now for the weird weird: I am a URM. I was extremely pleased to interview with a school where there were soooo many URM candidates in my interview group. At all my others, I had been one of the only brown dudes there and I'm not sure I interviewed with more than 2 African American people over the course of all of my other interviews. In my group at AMC however there were easily 25-50% (sorry for the wide range, it was almost a year ago) AA interviewees in the 20 or so person group and the dean (I think) who spoke with us was an AA dude himself. This all seemed great to me since it came across like a place that valued diversity deeply which means a great deal to me. HOWEVER, I compared AMC interview experiences with my non-URM friend. She shared the same pros and cons as I had, down to the awkward food cups. Once we got really into the breakdown though we discovered that her group was predominately ORM and mine was predominately URM. Not only that, but the speaker who talked to them wasn't the same AA dude, it was a white person. I AM NOT SAYING that there's anything inherently wrong with interviewing ORM candidates separately from URM candidates since I believe there's an argument to be made that it would help eliminate biases among interviewers comparing and potentially selecting ORM candidates over URM candidates. I AM ALSO NOT SAYING that this is what AMC does regularly, this is n=2 for crying out loud. WHAT I AM SAYING is that it felt... weird when I found this out. Obviously AMC does a phenomenal job recruiting URM candidates (check MSAR) and I'm glad it does. I'm not trying to make it seem like there's any sort of negative bias towards URM's at AMC because that's simply not the case. It was just a little weird when we compared notes.
So those are my reasons.
... Please, no more ketchup cups though. You've got people who have traveled thousands of miles to interview without a proper meal during the 16 hour commute. Don't turn it into a Seinfeld episode, AMC.
. I was also complete early and have gotten silence despite my raging desire for an II here.
