#20: Student interviews

As mentioned before, there are two kinds of individualized interviews: faculty interviews and student interviews. While faculty interviews are clearly the more important of the two, student interviews should not be completely overlooked. They will not make or break you, but they may help to give you a little push over other, more socially inept applicants. While both types of interviews will basically be run in the same manner, there are a few important differences to be aware of.

First of all, unlike faculty interviewers, student interviewers actually want to be at the interview, and probably won't do things like looking at their watch while conducting the interview. They actually believe they are making a difference, so they enjoy the opportunity to be there. Use this to your advantage. Know that they tend to recommend accepting those interviewees with whom they connect with most, rather than those who are most qualified. Your goal should be to move past the "acquaintance" stage and directly into the "close friend" stage with your student interviewer. Feel out your interviewer's personality, and pander to it copiously. Med schools generally pick the same types of people for their student interviewers, so you should have no problem with this after the first few rounds.

Student interviewers are also much more idealistic than their faculty counterparts. This means that you need to act as if becoming a doctor is the greatest profession on God's green earth, rather than just one of many equally good options. A good way to handle this situation is to specifically mention a few of the negative aspects of the medical profession that you have heard about, and then immediately proceed to downplay and poo-poo them. This will prove to your interviewers that you are just as idealistic as they are and are therefore worthy to enter their medical school. Nothing will boost your value in their eyes more than having unrealistic expectations about what your life as a doctor will be like.

Student interviews are also your opportunity to find out about the more "fun" aspects of medical school, which is really just another opportunity to make student interviewers feel that you will fit in well in their school. Make sure to ask a lot of questions that center around student happiness and well-being, such as:

• What kinds of things do you do students here do for fun?
• What is the hardest aspect of this school?
• What made you decide to come to this school?
• How does this school compare to others, in terms of curriculum structure, administrative involvement, and overall student happiness?
• What are a few things that you would change about your school, if you could?

Remember that asking questions is nothing more than another way to impress your interviewers! Not having questions to ask is not a sign of strength; it is a sign of unpreparedness. Do not make the mistake of thinking that the answers to your questions are relevant in any sense of the word.

#17: Taking time off after college

As mentioned previously, there are a few things you should try to put into your application to get med schools to take you seriously, all of which require an obscene amount of work through the first three years of college. If you're close to the end of college and you don't have anything to show for yourself (or if you're close to the beginning of college and don't plan on having anything to show for yourself), you will need to take time off after you graduate and do something drastic to improve your chances of getting accepted. There are a few prescribed things you should stick to when taking time off, because even though there are a lot of ways to spend time off between college and medical school, there are very few that selection committees consider to be "acceptable."

Medical schools will definitely respect time used to do research in a lab, especially if you get published. This is basically the same as doing research during the school year, except that it's more like a nine-to-five job and a lot more is expected of you. Because of both of these reasons, it makes it a lot more difficult to dick around while doing research for a full year. You'll also want to find some kind of grant to fund your time off, like a Fulbright scholarship: don't count on your parents wasting any more money on you just because you couldn't keep up with the rest of your classmates. Finally, make sure to make sure to get a good supply of crystal meth or some other strong stimulants, since research is boring as all hell and it's going to take something stronger than your typical cup of coffee to keep you awake.

Doing volunteer work is another option. There are lots of opportunities in this area, many of which are well advertised. For example, Teach for America enjoys sending out spam emails to college campuses in the hopes of reaching that one person on the planet who hasn't heard of them yet. They'll even go ahead and set up an appointment for you to meet with their recruiters without your consent, so you literally just have to show up in order to get a spot with them. There are also volunteer opportunities that allow people to practice bare-bones medicine in very rural parts of the world, especially in Latin America. It is pretty unethical for people without any medical training whatsoever to perform medical procedures on people from other parts of the world who are too destitute to care, but it still makes selection committees go absolutely cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs when they see an applicant who has these experiences.

Other year-long activities that medical schools consider "worthwhile" include getting other graduate degrees, starting your own business, or being someone famous (e.g., the child of a senator). Note that there are certain things that are absent from this list, like improving yourself as a person, or starting a family. Medical schools consider things like these to be a gigantic waste of everybody's time, especially theirs.

Of course, if no medical school accepts you even after you've taken some time off, you may have to consider alternatives such as a Caribbean medical school or even a D.O. program. Both of these types of schools are known for having lower standards than allopathic medical schools in the United States, so they are a viable possibilities for those of you who are desperate to get into a medical school and won't take no for an answer.

#15: Recommendations

A recommendation letter can make or break your med school application. A sparkling letter is equivalent to applying as a fifth generation legacy, so you should make sure to get as many as possible (stealing them from other students if necessary). Obviously the easiest way to secure these is to sleep with your professors, but generally speaking, the more mature or more female a professor is, the less likely they are to entertain this possibility. (Note that this is not true if you are in middle school.)

A more realistic way to get a good recommendation letter from a professor is to take a lot of classes with them, like more than five. Make sure to be that annoying kid who asks lots of questions during lecture and needlessly prolongs class for everyone else. It's a surefire way to guarantee that your professor - and everyone else - will never be able to forget you. If you can manage to do this for more than one professor, you should have no problem getting the recommendations you require. You will also be universally loathed by your classmates, which is a small price to pay for something so important.

If you have trouble burying your self-consciousness long enough to enact the previously mentioned tactic, you will need to take more subtle routes to remind your professor of how awesome of a student you were. One thing to do is to make a packet for your professors that has all the information they need in order to write the recommendation. Make sure to include a cover letter, a transcript with your best classes prominently highlighted, and a gift card to their favorite restaurant or department store. Feel free to blatantly lie about your accomplishments in your cover letter; as professors have to deal with upwards of 100 students per semester, it is highly unlikely that they will know anything about you. Finally, people often say to write professors a thank you letter once you've been accepted to a school, but this is entirely unnecessary; since you'll never see these professors again, you are under no obligation to pretend to care about what they think of you any longer.

If you can help it, try to get actual copies of the recommendation letters to see what they say about you. This can be easily accomplished by renting a P.O. Box from the post office for a fake program (e.g., "Tidewater University Summer Scholars Program"), and having your professor send in a recommendation to that P.O. Box for you. This course of action has many benefits, the most obvious of which is that you will be able to find out exactly what your professors will write about you. With this knowledge, you will now have the power to prevent them from backstabbing you in the future.

#11: Faculty interviews

Interviews are a way for medical schools to separate the normal people from the weirdos. Of course, they have a quota for weirdos that they need to accept, but overall they try to keep this number to a reasonable minimum. The reason they do this is that if anyone asks, they want to be able to talk a lot about diversity and then point to a few key statistics. This is what they like to do with minority applicants as well.

Med school interviews are different at different places. Traditionally, they are conducted by faculty members, although some schools are moving to interviews by medical students as well. If you interview at a school that has both faculty interviews and student interviews, remember that the faculty interviews carry about forty times more weight. Med students are only allowed to interview you so they can say they contributed to the school and feel good about themselves.

Before conducting the interview, faculty members will have read over your application very superficially for things that stand out at them. They will then ask you about these things in the interview. Don't mind that if they had just read the application more carefully, they would already have all the answers to their questions. They are just trying to classify you as either normal or weird based on the way you answer the questions.

Faculty members will also ask you if you have any questions for them, and it is important to prepare with a few:

• What kind of student would do well at this school?
• What has been your best experience here?
• What are the biggest hurdles that most students face?
• What are some mistakes you've seen students make?
• What are some recent changes the school has undergone?

The answers to these questions probably don't matter to you. The goal is to make yourself look good so that the school will accept you.

Remember that it never hurts to be a sycophant. Ask them about all the degrees they have cluttering their walls or about the important and cutting-edge work they do. While these topics have nothing to do with you as an applicant, it will make the faculty members feel good about themselves and report positively about you.

#8: Research

Research is a lot like volunteer work because every medical student will have it on their application. Therefore, so should you. However, unlike volunteering, lying about research when you have not done any is more problematic. Since research is more technical than that "touchy-feely volunteer work" stuff, it is harder to pull off having done some when you really haven't. If you want to say you have done some research, it is important for you to be able to back it up with things like talking about how important your research is to all of society and dropping scientific terminology. Otherwise it is best not to mention research at all.

There are two kinds of research: clinical research and basic science research. Clinical research involves a lot of talking to patients and crunching data. It will be pretty easy for you to get a publication out of clinical research because clinical researchers will publish anything.

On the other hand, basic science research involves you spending a lot of time in a dirty old lab, doing a lot of science experiments which fail most of the time. For this reason, it is more difficult to get a publication out of basic science research. Another reason is that most professors in charge of labs are socially inept and have no desire to help you succeed. Even with all these drawbacks, medical schools like seeing basic science on applications more than clinical research because they know that clinical researchers do not actually do any work.

#5: Volunteer work

Volunteer work is one of those things that you need to have on your medical school application, for a number of reasons. First of all, every other med school applicant will have it on their application. So if you want to be a competitive applicant, it is one of those things you need to have on yours as well. Secondly, not having volunteer work on your application is like directly telling the selection committee that you have always hated poor people and want to deport them all to Mexico. Since this is looked down upon for the most part, it is best to avoid the whole situation in the first place.

You may be under the impression that medical schools like applicants who talk about medically-related volunteer work, but this is not necessarily the case. Medical schools know that most people who have done "medically-related volunteer work" have not done anything more than taking people's heart beats or babysitting sick kids in the hospital's surgical ward.

The easiest way to have volunteer work on your application is to lie about what you've done. The only problem with this method is that if you get asked about what you did in an interview, you will need to be able to talk at length about how much you accomplished and how much it meant to you. If you go decide to take this approach, make sure to rehearse your story so that you know it well and can tell it the same way every time.

Another way to put volunteer work on your application is to volunteer for something small and then exaggerate about how much you did. For example, a two-hour volunteering session can easily become a three-month-long organizing-and-implementing endeavor by picking the right language and spacing out the timeline of events.

However, if you have a lot of time before sending in your application, actually doing a more long-term volunteer project saves you the trouble of having to think of really creative ways to embellish your accomplishments.

#2: Applications

Medical schools are always looking to fill their ranks with the best and brightest students available. That's why they sit around in dark rooms and arbitrarily decide on measures of success to apply to applicants. Mostly this consists of drunkenly throwing darts at each other, and then shouting the first thing that comes to mind upon being struck. The final set of agreed-upon measures are kept completely secret, and are not made available to applicants, ever. This is done to keep them from knowing why they did or did not receive an acceptance.

However, the people on medical school selection committees are not very creative, and the set of measures that they finally decide on are generally similar from one application cycle to the next. If you want to have a strong application, it is best to include things that medical schools have a history of drooling over, such as a high MCAT score, volunteer work, leadership positions, and/or having a parent who is a physician. If these are not options for you, you might want to try spending a few years after college doing something a little off the beaten path, such as helping to prevent the spread of nutritional parasites through rural populations in Kyrgyzstan.

Be careful, however. An excess of the above-mentioned factors is known to cause medical schools to preemptively reject applicants for no plausible reason whatsoever. In order to prevent this from happening, you need to present yourself as being both passionate and normal at the same time (unlike Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer). It may be necessary to place less emphasis on some of your accomplishments in order to create the proper balance that selection committees are looking for. Doing this is a painful process, but it is nowhere as painful as realizing that a school couldn't even be bothered to send you a rejection letter on actual paper and instead sent you your rejection in email format.

Additionally, careful rewordings of simple-sounding phrases and outright hyperbole are important tools to use when selling yourself in your application. Use websites like www.thesaurus.com to find other ways to say what you want to say. For example, if you worked as a janitor for a few months, you might want to use some of these alternative job titles:

• Custodial technician
• Domestic engineer
• Environmental services associate
• Guest service associate
• Industrial floor maintenance sanitation engineer

Finding the perfect synonym to replace an inferior sounding word is always a satisfying feeling, and will fool even the most astute of selection committees without being a complete fabrication.