High school to BS/MD

 A bit about me- I grew up in Taiwan and moved to the US when I was 11. While in high school, I made the decision to become a doctor. However, I had heard horror stories about the difficult nature of the medical school application process. Normally, one applies to med school during their college years. With the BA/BS/MD programs, one obtains conditional acceptance into medical school during their senior year of high school. After hearing about the existence of BS/MD programs, I decided to give it a shot.

I was not the first one in the family to go into medicine. My father is a doctor in Taiwan. My 2 cousins were already practicing physicians at the time I was applying. One was valedictorian at the same high school I attended and went on to Harvard for undergrad followed by Columbia for med school. The other had gone to Brown’s PLME program, another well=known BS/MD program. My sister, who is 4 years older than me and a senior in college, was also applying to med school as well. To summarize, the level of achievement in my family was through the roof, and that expectations were high for me and my sister.

I had done well in high school. I wasn’t exceptional , but I had decent grades. There were many people smarter than me in high school, though some may not have worked as hard. I knew I wasn’t the smartest but I had a great work ethic. The whole 4 years felt like a grind where I was constantly calculating what grade I needed to get on the next exam to get an A for the course.

The grind included the SAT’s. I scored initially a 2100, then 2200, then 2270 on the SAT’s (back then when it was out of 2400). I envied those who took the test without studying but still managed to still score higher than me. My score only came after endless practice questions. My grades in school were decent- mostly A’s and I think 2 B’s for the whole 4 years. By the time I got ready to apply, my GPA was 3.95.

I received only 3 interviews- UMKC, Drexel, and Jefferson. Got waitlisted at UMKC, rejected at Jefferson, and accepted at Drexel. The day I got the acceptance was incredible. It was almost as if all those years of hard work had paid off. Looking back now, I feel like I probably paid too much emphasis on this event. Even if I had not gotten in, things would have turned out fine.