peppermintgal said:
Congrats Nutellagirl! The wait is finally over.. Cornell is really a top choice school.
If you don't mind me asking, what were your stats?
Thank you all for the encouragement. That call meant everything. I am still a little numb, despite my initial cathartic sobs to the director of Cornell admissions. I know that I am very fortunate to have heard so early, and pray that all of you get the news you have worked so hard for in the weeks to come. I have a microbiology take home final due today and I am too wound up to focus!
So, for my stats:
I'm a married post-bacc 32 year old former journalist living in New York City. I graduated from Harvard in 1997 (I am class of 1995 however, but took a couple of years off here and there) cum laude in Romance Languages and Literatures. I had wanted to be an MD since I was a little girl and started pre-med like every other 17 year old and just could not stomach the competition and freaky Harvard crud. I became a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor in Boston and had a Pew fellowship to Johns Hoipkins SAIS and to report on child labor in Morocco. (I am a language collector) Then I was hired by the Associated Press international desk in New York and was going to be posted in Cairo the following year, but 9/11 happened and I was one of the many journalists laid off. I was essentially unemployed for the next 1.5 years (getting by nannying, etc.) as there were just no jobs to be found. Great for the self esteem. For my 30th birthday, my husband gave me a cocker puppy who turned out to be very sick (he's ok now
),and I started to think about medicine again, and eventually had the epiphany that I had always wanted to be a doctor, but just not the kind who treats humans (I had also been considering whether entering the seminary to become an Episcopal priest was right for me). Anyways, 2 years ago, I started working in my dog's clinic and took a chem class at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, was able to hack it, took the summer chem course and then started full time at Hunter.
I had about 650 hours as a paid vet assistant at that small clinic, 550 as a paid tech at a 24 hour vet hospital the next spring and summer, 300 hours volunteering at an equine hospital in Orgeon, 500+ hours this summer at The Animal Medical Center in Manhattan (the Mayo Clinic of the pet world) doing their unpaid full-time 10 week internship as a clinic aide, and about 300 hours of research with lab rats (which was very tough emotionally) FOURTEEN YEARS ago the summer before I started Harvard.
My academics were iffy as an undergrad. I worked hard and got As and Bs, but Cum laude doesn't mean what it means now- the standards are tighter these days. I had somewhere around a 3.3-3.4 (Harvard had a different GPA scale:Groups I-XV
), including what counts as an F (but is kindly called "Absent") at Harvard for panicking and just deciding to bail on my physics for poets final, a B- in Bio (that really should have been lower ) because I also left the final after 10 minutes in a panic, and withdrew one term after some family stuff.
I did very well in my post-bacc: about a 3.77, all As and A+s except for an A- in Gen Chem 2, a B-in Orgo 1 and a B in Orgo 2 (those two grades being the proudest I have ever earned) and took the GRE once in April: 670 V (94%) and 750 M, 5.5 A.
To any of you who have also not considered yourself "sciency," I had to work my butt off to keep up with the material and not succumb to major waves of inadequacy. But it is possible. There is just nothing else that clicks for me but veterinary medicine, and I feel so blessed that the thought occurred to me.
Happy New Year!
Elisabetta Coletti
on sliding by the orgo lab 2 (same here for me)....
At least I now know when I see their name in my mailbox again it will be for real 
