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Silly AMCAS
Remember how the AMCAS med school application website doesn’t work with any modern browsers? How I can’t upgrade Firefox past 3.0 on my Mac at work because there are no other supported OSX browsers, and at home I can only use IE 8 in compatibility mode? They haven’t fixed it yet.What’s even more frustrating is…
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Castle Crashers and Cramping
Writing essays for med school secondary applications has been “cramping my style,” so to speak (if one is speaking as a bit actor in a late-night infomercial). The necessity of completing these assignments takes priority over a number of other activities I would much rather be doing. I often wonder if anybody actually bothers to…
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First Secondaries
So far, I’ve only navigated the first few of the many frustrating and agonizing stages of the med school application process. I’ve already submitted my centralized application via AMCAS (using IE8’s compatibility view since no other browsers work). While I wait for AMCAS to get around to looking at my application and verify that I…
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AMCAS Fail
The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) has a centralized med school application that everybody fills out, ostensibly to save time for both applicants and admissions committees. Unfortunately, a whole new generation of browsers have arrived seemingly without their notice. It’s a real shame when I can go to a site for future doctors in…
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Graduated Yet?
Even though I walked across the stage at the beginning of what is now last month, I still haven’t actually graduated. I more or less fell into a trap of my own making, because at the beginning of the semester I decided I wanted to get credit for my research internship again. This involves a…
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Test Day
I took the MCAT today in Bethesda at 8:00 AM. Perhaps I should repeat that: I had to be in Bethesda today at 8 AM to take a five-hour test. Normally—that is, without traffic, so it’s probably more accurate to say abnormally—it takes about 45 minutes to get from my house to Bethesda. So in…
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Medium for Consternation, Anguish, and Trepidation
Preparing for the MCAT is difficult on an emotional level as much as it is on a purely intellectual level. Just as with the rest of the med school application process, my moods oscillate between courageous optimism ( “This isn’t that bad, you’ll get into a bunch of schools” ) and abject despair ( “You’re…
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Running the Race
Pre-med students are, by nature, competitive. There is room for debate on whether it is the stressful path that makes us this way, or if it is our personalities that direct us to take the path. Either way, the result is that we spend an awful amount of time comparing ourselves to others (especially other…
Matter, Energy, and Life of Michaela A. Castello.