Congrats to you for achieving your goal. Based on your post, is it safe to assume you are not in your late 30s? If so, I'm interested to hear how, if at all, your age came up on the interview trail.
And what about your fellow med students? I remember looking around at my law school orientation and thinking "who are these old people?" when I would see a non-trad. Now I'm going to be the old person if I'm lucky enough to get next cycle. Have you integrated well into your class (assuming that's something you want to do)?
I am in my late thirties, yes. I honestly don't know which of my interviewers, if any, knew my exact age. Nobody put it out there as directly as "So you're 3X, huh?". In open interviews, obviously when they looked at my application they could see the dates of when I went to college and the dates of my first job, so some of them had an idea that I wasn't 23.
For the most part, honestly, the depth of experience on my application was a positive. Most of my interviewers were quite eager to ask about things on my application from some time ago, especially the non-medical things I've done. My earliest employment was in the professional arts, and twice I was matched with interviewers who also had music or theatre work in their own past. I very much doubt those were accidents. I was asked more than once to just explain the path that had brought me here and what made me decide that was I going to do this now versus earlier, but it was never in an unkind way.
Overall I think the huge range of experiences on my application worked for me.
If you have kids, did that come up at all?
I don't have children, and that fact never came up.
And what about your fellow med students? I remember looking around at my law school orientation and thinking "who are these old people?" when I would see a non-trad. Now I'm going to be the old person if I'm lucky enough to get next cycle. Have you integrated well into your class (assuming that's something you want to do)?
The first time my age ever came up to any classmate was a few weeks into anatomy when someone in my dissection group complained of feeling old at 25. I of course laughed and said imagine how I feel at
*my age*. The group went silent and jaws dropped, and one girl said, "Whoa, I totally never thought that!". And now of course most people that I talk to regularly know. It doesn't affect our working relationship at all; if anything my being older and having worked several years in healthcare seems to have a positive effect on a lot of people's trust in me. And I find that being able to interject a different viewpoint during discussions is valuable.
I do notice a mindset difference, though some undoubtedly also comes from the fact that I was raised in a different socioeconomic background than many people who go to medical school. I notice slang being used that I'm not used to, references to music I don't know, little things like that that remind me that yes, there's a generational difference here. Sometimes I do feel a little isolated, though it's not the fault of my classmates. It's just very obvious when I look around that I'm older (and doesn't help that every professor constantly does the *tee hee, you're all too young to remember this, but...* and then says something that happened when I was like 16). But as I said it's me and not their behavior, and just something that was inevitable. It doesn't make me regret coming here, not at all.
And there will be other old folks in your class. My roommate is another non-trad SDNer that I met in last year's application cycle thread who's even older than I am, and we help keep each other sane. And I've been told it all shifts in third year when you're actually on the wards and interacting with people more in their 30s and older. Which will be nice. But it's been fine, and I'm quite happy that so many of my classmates think it's "so cool" that I'm doing what I'm doing.
