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bad dean's letter
Started by Aquafinalina
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its fairly bad. what do i do?
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in order to get an idea of what to do we'd have to get an idea of what "bad" means in this context. did the dean put you down in their written portion of the letter? was it whatever was copied from evaluations from your clerkships that looked bad? depending on what exactly was "bad" and how "bad" it was there are different avenues you can (or can't) take
Yeah, we need a little more to go on to help you out. Create another profile if you're worried about anonymity (though it looks like the one you have is pretty new).
I have the same question. I'm a completely average medical student going into psychiatry with an average dean's letter, except for comments on my ob/gyn clerkship making me sound like the worst student ever, with a large paragraph, and saying that I barely passed which is not representative of me. However, my medical school won't let me change much on my dean's letter. What should I do? I don't want to do a residency that is awful and no one wants. Will I match somewhere normal?
I don't think that one bad eval is going to sink you, especially when it's not in the field you're applying to.
I think it also depends on exactly what they said. As someone who is in psychiatry, I would have more reservations about a student whose file had an eval that mentioned you had problems interacting appropriately with patients (since that IS a big part of psych) than I would be that made a negative comment about your OB knowledge. Personally, I know that ob/gyn people can be...hard to please. 🙂
You might want to try to think of a diplomatic way to explain what happened on that rotation without sounding like you're making excuses. Try to think of a positive spin to put on "what you learned from it".
Ah, OB! Well I had a horrible horrible horrible experience in OB-gyn when I was a student. They totally went for the jugular when they did my eval, but the clerkship director finally put something neutral/mildly positive on the evaluation which ultimately is what got transferred onto my dean's letter. I think that most people including PDs know how "hard core" OB rotations are, and how many/most students have a hard time with it. I don't want to say anything *too* negative about OB rotations as to not get flamed on the board, but I think it's needless to say that PD's in other specialties sort of know the deal with comments/evals that are coming from OB. If you otherwise have a decent Dean's letter, I would not sweat it. However is it possible that you can talk to the people who wrote your evals in OB and have them remove some things or make it more neutral? Any way you can meet with your dean and talk to him/her? Some schools are more restrictive than others regarding changes to the letter, but it is possible.
Yeah, I pretty much got torpedoed on my Ob/Gyn eval too. The good news is that my med school incorporated the minimum number of comments from that rotation into my Dean's Letter, which, otherwise, included pretty good comments.
Moving to ERAS forum.
Bad on SDN can mean "this was a great student who sometimes struggled with presentations."
Bad IRL can mean something more along the lines of this individual was dishonest/not a team player/dangerous etc all adjectives nobody wants to see in an intern.
Bad IRL can mean something more along the lines of this individual was dishonest/not a team player/dangerous etc all adjectives nobody wants to see in an intern.
