Harvard Health Careers Program

To date, the Health Careers Program has placed 73 percent of its current applicants in medical schools--a figure that will probably increase between now and summer and is already double the national average. These students are unusually qualified because they have passed two related tests: the rigor of the science courses offered by the Extension School and the difficulty of studying in the evening. In both a macro- and microcosmic sense, they possess the determination to start over: they return to school, often after a hiatus of many years, to learn the elementary science necessary to apply to medical school, and many of them go to school after working all day. Every evening, they must arouse their wills and sharpen their alertness to begin a second shift while the rest of the world eases toward dinner, sofa, Seinfeld, and sleep.

Of special interest this year are some students who started over in another sense: they earned a place in medical school only after a second or even a third application.

Michele LeMon was born and raised in the prairie country close to Canada, subject to its famous character-building winters. After earning her undergraduate degree in nutrition at the University of North Dakota, she worked in parenteral feeding, the urgent pumping of nutrients into the veins of patients unable to nourish themselves by mouth. This work, which links feeding and healing, suggested the fitness of Michele's moving on to medical school. Her chief obstacle, however, was a rather mysterious inability to do well on the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT). This was an old story: her SAT scores had been negligible, even though her grades in high school, in college, at Oxford during a junior year abroad, and here at Harvard were uniformly excellent. Even so, she twice failed to get into medical school. Her solution? Return to her roots and to her alma mater, earn a master's degree, and reassume her North Dakota residency. Applying to medical school at UND, she essentially outflanked the MCAT. Michelle will begin medical study this fall in Grand Forks.

...Even students from good schools with good grades can get caught outside the crowded gates.

Still another belatedly successful applicant is Mischa "Rip" Mirin, who graduated from Brown University with a formidable double major in psychology and neural sciences. Along with a GPA of 3.7, he possessed a number of brainiac accoutrements: a deadpan, out-of-the-blue sense of humor, a fondness for pinball and science fiction, a Berlinish black leather jacket and crewcut, and a strong background in neurological research in anurans, also known as frogs. His travels included many unexpected locales, including Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Salt Lake City. At the University of Utah, he enrolled in a human anatomy course, impressed the instructor, and subsequently served as an anatomy lab assistant--an exposure that triggered his interest in medicine. His first application to medical school lacked evidence of the human touch underlying his tangentialities, and led to no acceptances. The second time through, his letters of recommendation included a report of his hospital volunteering, where his kindness and dedication were apparent, and his sense of humor a usable strength. After many interviews, his acceptances included Northwestern University Medical School, where he will begin studying in September. Another second-time applicant is Nathaniel Clark, originally an English major from Yale, who impressed his recommenders with the subtlety and acuity of his analyses in the classroom. Some of these analyses were ghost-portraits, conclusions drawn from absences, e.g., Leontes's silence in the second scene of The Winter's Tale, the discussion of what a certain filmmaker didn't show. Although Nat's "wise passiveness," to use Wordsworth's phrase, his inclination to watch silently and understand and describe, is a mainstay both of science and the humanities, his first application did not show enough experience in the sciences to gain his acceptance. The second year, however, he was able to provide a letter of recommendation from his calculus instructor reporting a 99 percent average for exams and classwork, and another from his physics teaching assistant ranking him in the top five percent of that TA's students. This fall Nat will begin studying medicine at Allegheny University in Philadelphia.

Currently, the medical school application process is so competitive that even students from good schools with good grades can get caught outside the crowded gates. Dedication and persistence characterize the successful applicant, even if success comes the second time around.