Application process

Tomorrow's the day for my first medical school interview of the season. I'm slightly less nervous this year than last, just because I've been through the process at this particular school before and it is the one I'm most familiar with anyway. I'm still a bit twitchy to make a good impression and actually get in this year, but that usually works to my benefit.

The more frustrating part of the process are the schools which either STILL show my application as incomplete, or have given me no information on where I stand. It drives me nuts not knowing whether they are even looking at my application yet. Admissions offices do not answer their phones, shunning the applicants directly to voice mail which they never reply to. One of the programs I applied to last year confided that they do record "contacts" like those in your application file for consideration.

Someone outside the process confided that another applicant she knew was engaged in a "postcard campaign" of trying to get off the waiting list into the admitted class by sending some form of correspondence every couple of weeks. I would find that incredibly annoying if I were on the admissions staff, but apparently it is a process with reasonable success. I'm trying to decide whether I have the fortitude to begin such a process now when I don't know whether they've even gotten to my application.

In many cases, it is nice to not be a student during this process because I have more freedom with my schedule and more energy for following up on loose ends. But right now, it sure would be nice to have some distraction from the fact that I'm back to waiting, checking email again and again, heading to the mailbox as soon as I hear the mail truck, checking for voicemails, and just generally acting like a lovestruck idiot.