Lawrance Chow, VFMP 2014
Admission to medical school has always been an extremely competitive and daunting task, perhaps more now than ever. Incoming medical students all remember what it was like being a pre-medical student in their undergrad – the pressure of the competition often driving us to do whatever it takes to get here. There are also prevailing attitudes on what kind of background a medical school candidate ought to look like – a young urban student who went straight to a large academic university after high school, worked in a lab, volunteered internationally, and exceled straight on to medical school without ever a doubt in his/her mind of the career choice.
What if you didn’t fit these molds? What if you came from a low-income family and weren’t able to volunteer internationally? Or you came from a rural area and weren’t always on the straight and narrow to medical school? Would you not be a good doctor? Would you even still bother applying?
UBC has for a long time had a broad admissions policy – that is, the process has valued diverse life experiences and backgrounds in the selection of our future doctors. Even still, these widespread myths of the “traditional applicant” often cause medical applicants to be self-selecting and ends up hurting the diversity of our applicant pool. As a class, we thrive on learning from the diversity of our classmates and as physicians, our diversity will only help us to serve our diverse patient population.
Last year, 3 medical students from the VFMP and NMP ran an inter-site project through our DPAS curriculum to debunk some of these admission myths. The website encourages students from a wide background of underrepresented populations to educate themselves on the reality of the admission process and to seriously consider medicine as a career. While debunking myths, the website also highlights videos of real student success stories who went through similar ordeals.
Working with faculty, the goal of the project would be to recalibrate the reality of UBC’s broad-based admissions policies to assist those underrepresented populations who are already experiencing significant barriers to a medical career.
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