I applied to and was accepted to 2 foreign med schools, took the mcat TWICE and, get this, actually ATTENDED one of the schools for about 2 weeks until I finally came to the conclusion that I truely did not want to do it.
Basically, what happened is this: I've been brought up in a house where my father was a doctor and my mother was a nurse. Naturally, I grw to have an interest in health care, medicine in particular. All my life I had thought I wanted to be a physician. Then I came to college and was exposed to SO much more than I had ever been, and so I grew, as most people do in college and began exploring these new avenues in health care, especially towards the end of my college career, and I even got a job in an optometrist's office to try that out. Unfortunately, I simply couldn't find a job in a dentist's office at the time, so I just did some internet research and found it to be facinating. I'm a person who likes working with my hands. I own my own computer business in which I hand make computers and I am a musician (I'm a pianist and I make modern electronica music which you can listen to at
www.noahneiman.com, but you have to turn off your pop-up blocker, or allow mywebsite to have pop-ups in your pop-up blocker options
).
Nevertheless, my mind had been so set on becoming a physician, and I had such a strong psuh toward it from my parents that I just decided to apply again (2nd time), with my 2nd MCAT score and I was accepted to St. George's Medical School. It was a very hard decision to leave to US, but I did it. Once I got there, I came to the realization that it was NOT what I wanted, and in addition to a number of other reasons such as the fact that I had a very big chance of losing my fiance if I stayed away from her for nearly 4 years in a different country, the fact that I was not comfortable AT ALL in the new environment due to the sudden culture shock, and that the school does not look as it does in pictures, I left.
My pirmary concern was for my relationship with my fiance. I did not want to jeoperdize that. In addition, I began thinking of my relationship with my father. He and I have barely any rlationship at all and it's because all my memories of him are of him leaving, or coming home too tiered to spend any quality time with me, my sister or my mother. Not to get too personal, but suffice it to say that the medical field is pretty bad about rewarding the work that it's physicians have put in, and it's only going to get worse. My father has all but disowned me because of my decision against becoming a physician, but I'm sticking with it, because I don't want my son or daughter to have the same relationship that I have with my father.
Now, obviously, family life isn't the only reason I have for switching from medicine to dentistry. Like I said above, I enjoy working with my hands. The detail of the work matches my interests in working on music and building computers. I feel very inspired by the dentist I shadow now, much more so than I ever did when leaving the hospital I used to volunteer at. Whenever I leave his office, I feel happy and proud of myself for pursuing this field of healthcare because I beleve that I will make a good dentist.
So to answer your question, bottom line is, you do need to tell them about applying to med school and/or getting accepted. If they find out about that and that you didn't tell them, it can look REALLY bad. Just know, you're not the first person to apply to med school, turn down the acceptance and pursue something else. Hell I did it, but you have to have a reason, and if you don't have a reason, well, you might want to ask yourself exactly what it is you're doing...
