Thanks for the perspective - this is what I suspected and feared when I accepted the offer back in 2020, but it was difficult to turn down the certainty of FlexMed against the unguaranteed potential acceptances & aid offers had I gone through the regular cycle. Now I'm wondering if I made the right decision, but you're right - in the grand scheme of things, it should work out financially, though this financial aid package is going to hurt a bit.
I think I'm going to try asking for more aid, but my initial discussions with the aid office didn't seem very promising. Do you (or anyone else) have advice on how to approach this? I'm from a solidly middle-class family and if my parents stretch they can help me make this work, but they've already put me through college and I feel immensely guilty about putting yet another burden on them.
Not really, because at this point it really is just begging. The problem is that your parents can make it work by stretching while many others can't, so that's the expectation. Many people like you, including people whose parents have a lot more resources, do not receive any parental support at all for grad school. And they are just totally screwed. It's why PLUS loans exist.
As I said before, if you had other options, you could try to leverage them. That works at some schools, with some people, but not with others. Unfortunately, you don't have that, so you can't say "I love Sinai, but that numbers just don't work as compared to, say, Einstein, so can you please find come more money for me?" All you can do is say that your parents are just not in a position to provide the level of support they are calculating, so is there any way they can increase your grant?
They will very likely say no, because that is between you and your parents, and there are loans available to make up any shortfall in your EFC. And then, that's that, because, no, you have nowhere else to go, and spending two years taking the MCAT and rolling the dice in the regular admissions pool is really not a viable option at this point. An unfortunate hidden cost of the guarantee, and probably a big reason they offer the program in the first place, to lock people like you in. Good luck!
