I know this might seem a bit cheesy, but I'm a girl, and I'm allowed to ask questions like these (not that guys can't ask them too).
I want to know if anyone has stories of coming from seemingly "nothing" to getting into med school. and by that I mean, strenuating circumstances where people in your shoes would have given up, but you persevered, and that's what got you into med school today.
ie. rising from poverty (which I know how it feels, to live off food stamps), persevering when no one else believed in you, persevering when your grades may have not screamed "med school worthy"
I'll probably get flamed for this, but so what!
I'm not a pre-med
🙂, but I frequent this forum for my boyfriend, who is. Still, I'll comment, and y'all can be mad at me for doing so.
I didn't go to med school, but I won a full scholarship to go to Oxford for a master's program and now am in the first year of a really great Ph.D. program back in the states.
I don't mind telling this story because to me it's not being pro-me, it's being anti- "these people will never make it", so please don't take it as boastful. I just was told for so long that I'd never be able to do anything, that I should just give up, that I was just damaged goods and that was that....
My dad was physically abusive to my mom and me, growing up, to the point where I really wouldn't know, if I came home from school, who would still be alive. If it was silent, I'd try to be really quiet coming in, so that if either of them were dead I could see the scene without being seen and escape before I was gotten, too. I planned escape routes, slept with my clothes on, slept with a weapon. I saw my dad attempt to kill my mom. Senior year of high school I just lived at friends' houses, instead, with a box of clothes on top of my locker. Because of all this I was suicidal from 11-18, roughly. I've been hospitalized and strip-searched. My grades were crap. Eventually I made them get better, but it was only in the last little bit of high school.
I got lucky and got into a pretty good university, with financial aid. I found out afterwards that they're pretty good about admitting people who come from these kinds of backgrounds and trying to turn them around. They have free housing on campus during breaks in case you can't go home for them, for instance. The support they have is really key.
I knew I wouldn't be able to rely on my family at all, so I worked really hard during undergrad to be able to go to grad school afterwards with full funding, which did indeed happen afterwards but I was just really lucky, because not everyone who works that hard actually does get one of those scholarships -- there are too many good applicants.
The first few years of undergrad were kind of hard. Not academically so much as socially. I mean, I was coming out of years of major depression, and I actually slowly learned that, my god, there *are* people you can trust in the world. Crazy.
And yea, it's been really good for me. Two things I've learned, though: people still will discount you if you tell them about your background, and at least for *my* route it hurts rather than helps in admissions or scholarships. I know med schools like to hear stories of you overcoming stuff, but as far as I'm concerned, every scholarship application in which I mentioned it rejected me and the one scholarship application in which I didn't mention it accepted me. I don't know, I think these elites who run the scholarship systems have some built-in notion that you have to have had a perfect upbringing to succeed. Which is why I tell the story, because I don't like abused women being told that, well, the stereotypical abused woman suffers crap for the rest of her life. No, you can have a good life. I never thought I'd live to 18, let alone go to uni, let alone go to grad school, let alone do a Ph.D. program. Never would have thought. If you think you're going to have a crap life, no matter what you do, you're going to.
