Interviews while traveling--please help!

[ajswiss]

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Hello All,

I was hoping for a bit of advice/perspective. I will be apply to med school this coming summer. How feasible is it to plan a 'round-the-world trip to begin after I submit my application? I know I can do secondaries on the road, but flying back for interviews would be much more cumbersome, I'm sure.

If you have applied to medical school and then traveled afterwards, please fill me in on how you handled the interview process. Is there a way to guess at what dates you need to be back in the states for interviews? Any advice appreciated.

 

[LizzyM]

Hello All,

I was hoping for a bit of advice/perspective. I will be apply to med school this coming summer. How feasible is it to plan a 'round-the-world trip to begin after I submit my application? I know I can do secondaries on the road, but flying back for interviews would be much more cumbersome, I'm sure.

If you have applied to medical school and then traveled afterwards, please fill me in on how you handled the interview process. Is there a way to guess at what dates you need to be back in the states for interviews? Any advice appreciated.

Most interviews don't start until September although a few schools begin in August. Some schools begin making offers on October 15 while others hold all decisions until March. Some schools finish interviewing by mid-December while others continue through late winter or early Spring. You can be almost guaranteed that schools will not interview candidates between Monday, Dec 24, 2012 and Tuesday January 1, 2013.

There are two ways to approach this... if you are a very strong candidate (current gpa is >3.84 and your MCAT is expected to be >35) then you might want to pick a 2-3 week period in October and let schools know by email that you will be traveling in 2012-13 but you plan to be in the US from Oct 7-28. If you are a less strong applicant, you might want to do the same but make it the last 3 weeks of January to give schools that look at the best applicants first a chance to get to your application. As soon as you get an offer from one school, contact all the schools you've applied to that are within a few hours drive of that school and let them know you will be "in the area". If you've been queued for an interview but the invitation hasn't been issued yet (there are reasons that schools don't want to issue invitations months in advance) they might move you up to help you take advantage of your proximity.

This advice also works for people who will be studying abroad on a fellowship or working abroad in a lab during a gap year.