Summer after Junior Year: Medical School Applications, African Vacations, and Technological Innovations
The application process to medical school may be the single most stressful time of a pre-med student’s fledgling career. You must collect all your transcripts from various institutions, request letters of recommendation, set up and do mock interviews (if your pre-med advisory committee offers them), fill out the TMDSAS (for Texas schools) and AMCAS (for the rest of the nation) applications, submit associated secondary apps, travel all over for interviews, and finally, after much patience and anxiety, experience the joy that is acceptance. Click here to jump to the Application Process.
During the summer between junior and senior year, I finished my applications to medical schools (a section devoted to this entire process follows), took a vacation to Egypt and Kenya, and got a job with a company that makes and sells EHR (electronic health records) software.
The trip to Egypt and Kenya was awesome. We were initially somewhat apprehensive about going to Egypt during this time (summer 2011), because the riots and “Arab Spring” movements were in full sway. But I’m very glad we went because seeing the colossal pyramids, temples, and cities constructed by that great civilization was truly awe-inspiring. The safari parks in Kenya were equally amazing, but in a more naturalistic sense. It was very peaceful in the savanna, and after seeing the different animals roaming freely in their true habitat, I’ll never be able to fully appreciate a zoo again.
Enjoying camel riding in Egypt
The trip was great to clear my head after the time consuming applications, and upon returning I had my first med school interviews (all that in the next section) and a job with an EHR company called Kabot International. Since I got hired after submitting my applications, I wasn’t able to list it on there. But despite not showing up on my apps, it was an extremely valuable experience; I learned all the intricacies of EHR and EMR, how they relate to the PPACA (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act...colloquially dubbed Obamacare) and Meaningful Use mandates, the issues involved with billing and reimbursements protocols for Medicare and private insurance, and how medicine and business are inexorably intertwined. I acted mostly as a salesman, going to different doctors’ offices and discussing the pros and cons of installing EHR and giving them demos of Kabot’s system. One of the most valuable things I took away from this is that the future of medicine is going to be more and more enmeshed with technology and documentation.