Hey everyone, just wanted to check in here. I'll be attending Mayo Medical School as an MS1 this upcoming year and wanted to wish you all good luck on this application cycle. Mayo definitely had the most exciting interview and I was blown away by how amazing this institution is, the abundance of resources, and the unmatched level of friendliness of everyone I met here. I know there are a few seasoned students following this thread, so feel free to ask any questions related to how you can better prepare yourself in this application process to Mayo.
Also, I wanted to insert some helpful information here that was compiled from other threads in years past so that you can have a better prepare yourself (and get excited!!) with applying here. I take no credit for this information as I'm just transferring it from last year to here for easier access and before this thread becomes too large.
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Quoted from: forsparta
Compilation of information from last year's Mayo thread. I do not state I wrote any of this (main authors: Snuke, Nerday Shortay Icanhazcheeseburger [sp], Wisco1, ect.) and do not guarantee accuracy of any statements. The views expressed are not in association with the Mayo Medical School (MMS) and can not be used as factual evidence.
However, I believe it is useful
M1 schedule consists of morning lecture/lab from 8AM-noon. Then we have "Basic Doctoring" (physical exam skills and history taking, etc) 1-2 days per week in the afternoons from 1-5. The majority of the afternoons are free.
M2 year is reversed with daily lecture/lab in the afternoons.
Over the course of the first two calendar years, you have a total of 30 weeks of time alotted for selective. 18 of those weeks have to be spent doing a selective (=20 hours/wk of professional enrichment) and 12 of them are "free time". You can go home and do a shadowing experience if you want. Do your 20 hours of shadowing in the week and the rest of the time you can spend with family or do whatever you want.
I have only been in Rochester for a month now but I am not worried about it. Everyone here is very close knit and we hang out alot together. There is plenty to do in Rochester, and if you get bored, the Twin Cities are less than 90 minutes away.
Oh man, where to start. Really, I just had an amazing incredible experience.
The interview day is long, but it seriously feels short. Everyone is incredibly nice, from admin people to MDs to students to random people on the street. All the students are blissfully happy (not just my hosts or the people running the tours. I think we met almost half the class, and not a single one - when pressed - could think of a major shortcoming to the school), and many of them turned down big names to go to Mayo. Amongst them: Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, UCSF, Wash U.
The interview day starts in the student center/admissions office. It's a small building across from the Gonda, rather out of place with the rest of the Mayo buildings because it's a renovated library. Very handsome inside, too. Gina is incredibly nice, and she did the orientation, which was largely the same video posted earlier and on the website. Then we met with the assistant dean of Academic and Student Affairs, then the Director of the Office of Diversity. Each of the talks were pretty short, which was nice. Then half of us had a 30 minute interview, the other half 30 minutes of down-time, then we switched. The ice was pretty much broken already because we'd met with our student hosts the night before to have dinner (and some of us helped the Birthday Baking Committee bake cupcakes!).
Then we had a tour of the Medical School. The Plummer building (library) is gorgeous, and we traipsed through the pedestrian subway, which is also very nice, and visited a few floors of the Gonda building. The Gonda building/Mayo Clinic is really quite majestic on the inside - marble and comfortable chairs everywhere, and someone was usually playing the grand piano. The peds floor is amazing - almost makes me want to be a pediatrician - and is designed for kids and to be very kid-friendly with curves and colors and low furniture everywhere.
Then lunch, then another interview/break, in which a few of us walked to the gym (which is a-MAZING and humongous) and had a tour (you get free membership your first two years). Then it was a short meeting with The Associate dean of Academic Affairs and a Dr. on the Admissions Committee chair.
Overall, in every possible aspect, it was incredible. Like I said, everyone is blissfully happy. One of my student hosts compared Mayo to a utopia, and it truly is of a kind. They make their own little world here, and they run it immaculately. Everything is literally for the patient.
And that's the key. Mayo-wear (what they call professional suit attire for when with patients) is to reduce the boundaries between patient and doctor. Everything is set up to make the patient more comfortable/for the patient's benefit.
The class size is, well, intimate. Everyone knows everyone and everyone's business, so if you aren't comfortable with that, that could be a problem. The small size, however, allows for opportunities that you can't have otherwise. In gross anatomy, they have a radiologist (because they CT the cadavers first), two surgeons expert in the field of whatever you're dissecting, and enough TAs to cover the rest of the tables. If you want to shadow someone, all you do is email them and set it up. There are a few set selectives, but people make up their own based on their interests, or if they want to travel somewhere, they do the hours of serving the underserved the first week and enjoy themselves the second week.
The interviews are really really low stress. The only stress is what you put on yourself. Both of my interviews started with 'tell me about yourself,' and you get to pretty much direct it from there.
I had one good interviewer, and one amazing, but pretty much everyone was very happy with who interviewed them. From what Gina was saying, some people fight to be scheduled to do interviews - especially the Director of Diversity, even though he has so much to do anyway, apparently.
And really, I just had this experience as I was eating out with my hosts - their friends would come up, see that we were prospectives, and the first thing out of their mouth was, 'you know, they treat us so well here.' It's delightfully amazing.
To share an I love Mayo moment with you: I spent yesterday afternoon working with a professional actor on improv comedy skills...the idea being that extremely active listening (as is necessary for improv and scene handoffs) leads to a more successful first 20-30 seconds of entering a patient room. Several of my classmates are camping tonight to prep for a mass-casualty wilderness survival experience, another is delivering babies in rural Arizona, and one is on his way to a wedding this weekend. And, if it all works out, we'll come together next Monday to play another kickball game. What an absolutely fantastic way to study medicine...if you are going to learn 46,000 new words and phrases during the first two years of school you might as well have some fun along the way!
Today during pediatric selective:
- Wake up, have coffee until 805am(others in the class doing this selective are out shadowing today in anything from gen peds to peds derm/ED/surg/etc.
- Meet Senior Sage (longitudinal geriatrics program) mentor for breakfast, interview and writeup afterwards--unrelated to selective but i had the morning free
- Lunch with peds residency director
- Neonatal resuscitation and umbilical line placement lab in simulator center from 1300-1530
...selective schedules vary widely though...so a more typical class day:
1st year:
8-12 a.m. is lecture/lab/group time. Some days we're out earlier.
12-1: Lunch/Free...usually time for interest group meetings, mentor meetings, attending grand rounds, interviewee lunches, etc.
1-5: Occasional afternoon activities (doctoring coursework, longitudinal development curriculum, volunteer programs, history taking skills, etc.)---on average over the year probably 2-3 afternoons a week have afternoons booked.
2nd year: essentially the reverse of above
3rd and 4th year: as with any medical school, mostly dedicated to time out on the wards so you could have days that are 24-36 hours long and others that are a basic outpatient clinic. Highly variable.
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Selectives: Mayo's first two years are structured such that you have a "block" of 6 weeks where you focus on a topic (i.e. in second year cardiovascular system, GI system), and then have two weeks for "selectives" You receive a travel budget to use during selecties.
Note: currently the med school will fund up to 3 trips per year for selectives
- This was amazing. It made medical school so painless. Essentially, you work hard for six weeks and then have 2 weeks of selective to do research casually, travel and work abroad. Selectives can be as structured as you want them to be. But honestly, they're essentially a break for you to do what you love, enhance your resume, or just rest.
- The majority of students had done clinical work (and sometimes non-clinical) in at least 1-2 countries courtesy of this by the end of second year (work in Haiti, Uganda, South Africa, Kenya, India etc...).
Teaching: I honestly think this is what really makes Mayo unique. The classes are extremely clinically oriented. There are no PhD's or MD/PhD research gurus who come in and lecture you on the nuances of their research. Our faculty goes through a huge screening process as many clinicians at Mayo want to be involved in education. Evaluations of faculty are used to screen out "bad apples." Thus, you end up with professors who are teaching because they want to, love to, and excel at it. In addition to this, the faculty that teach various blocks discuss and integrate their curriculum. This avoids redundancy and minutia from being taught.
Research: Whether it be clinical or basic science (though basic science not as strong), it is easy to do research. Mayo DOES have a 3 month research requirement built into third year (which is an AMAZING break). The year I graduated, out of the approximately 40 of us, >than half had more than 2 published papers (not counting abstracts, presentations etc..). There were a few of us that had published >10 papers by the end of medical school, and most in respected, high impact journals. At the end of the day, because there are so few Mayo medical students and Mayo provides incentives for faculty to publish papers with medical students (faster track to professorship), research and publishing is very accessible.
The system at Mayo is amazing. It's seamless. It is truly cost effective, efficient, and patient-oriented. You REALLY appreciate this as a 3rd year, 4th year, but most importantly as a patient. While I LOVE the institution that I currently am at for completely different reasons (again a "big 4" residency), I remember being dumbfounded my intern year by how inefficient, slow, and difficult the system at this "top hospital" was... more importantly, how these inefficiencies often led to patient errors.
Other random perks: Can do an MD/JD at ASU in 2 years. Mayo will pay for it, you don't have to take the LSAT. Mayo will also give you $10,000 if you pursue another degree (MPH etc...) at any other institution (people have left to do MBA's, MPH's, Master's at Oxford/Cambridge, Master's in fashion design, Master's in Journalism). At the end of a six week block, faculty will take you out or invite the class over to their place for dinners/drinks. The student body is MUCH MORE diverse in terms of where Mayo pulls students from (i.e. it is not IVY league undergrad heavy).
