Quoted: disciplinary action and med school application

[Doodledog]

I had a question and I am not sure who to ask. I was put on disciplinary probation and housing contract expulsion in my freshman year. The complainant of the disciplinary report also filed legal charges and the case was dismissed with me having a clean record. This was a isolated incident and the judicial affairs office at my school will only give the information if the medical school asks for it. If i have a clean legal record how serious is the schools judicial record against me? My MCAT and gpa is great and this diciplinary probation is not on my transcript of acedemic recod. What is the screening process for medical school admissions and how should I go about dealing with this situation. Thank you so much for your time.

First, as always, any legal issues should be discussed with lawyers and any issues about what should be reported on AMCAS should be discussed with AMCAS.

However, on the assumption, and I believe there is little doubt about this, that you need to report this on your AMCAS application, the real question is how to handle it and what to write. This is a very common SDN question and if you search the forums, you'll see a range of opinions about it.

In general, the best approach is to use the institutional action section of AMCAS to briefly explain what happened, indicate you've learned your lesson and that you've matured. In general, it is not a good idea to use your essay to discuss this or even secondary essays. There may be some exceptions to this however if the episode was very serious (e.g. DUI or academic fraud). It is always a bad idea to attempt to say that you weren't really at fault or to rationalize in writing what happened.

Now, in your particular circumstance, it can be hard to give you more specific advice without knowing more details. It sounds like you had some altercation or disagreement within your dorm and were expelled from the dorm and had further legal conflict about this that was resolved. That would be a fairly major event in the eyes of most adcoms and is a lot more substantial than having a beer in your dorm room which mostly makes Adcoms laugh (if isolated, one time, frosh type infraction....). So, be prepared to clearly, but briefly explain what happened, make sure all of your application demonstrates not just your abilities, but also your maturity and be prepared to answer questions about this, in detail, during your interview. Practice with a truly neutral party what you'll say.

Good luck.

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