Jessica S. is a non-traditional premed who applied to medical school for the 2013 entering class. She did most of her premed requirements when completing her BA in Texas, but attended a mid-west University to update her work after 13 years in business. So far, Jessica has had five interviews. Her guest post addresses an important consideration for all non-traditional pre-meds. -DonO
“Oh! I thought you would be an old woman!” My medical school interviewer was shocked to see me as “not an old woman.” After four interviews, I was used to this overt ageist language. I greeted him warmly and we had a lovely conversation about my motivations to medicine.
As an approximately 37-year-old, non-traditional applicant, I have faced admissions requirements unique to the older student. One school requires three interviews for older students. instead of the single interview required of currently-graduating applicants. Sometimes my interviewers seemed nervous about age as they opened the interviews, and made statements ranging from “age is not a consideration” to unsolicited promises that the interviewer did not know my age.
At yet another school, a faculty member ended my interview with a surprisingly candid statement. He said he enjoyed our discussion, particularly regarding my research, and that ordinarily he would recommend me for admittance. However, he did not feel that he could do so at my age, because, “I would not do medical school again at your age.” Older premeds need to be especially prepared for these surprises during your medical school interviews.
What lessons have I learned through the process to help you overcome any perception of age bias?
Here are my “top tips” for the older, non-traditional applicant:
Exude confidence! As an older applicant you have leveraged your strengths and managed the weaknesses. This is a big advantage you have over other less experienced applicants.
No excuses. Either you are just as capable as every other premed, or you are not. This ability is a gift. Be happy you can learn the material and exude confidence when you make your application and interview.
Be inclusive. Recognize that your peers are now of all ages, from all reference points, and with the best of credentials in all sorts of fields of interest.
Highlight your accomplishments. The less conformist your accomplishments, the more notable your accomplishments will appear on your application. Find your unique achievements and shine!
Make the most of your life forward. You have volumes of past experiences to compensate for your alleged lack of youth. This may be valuable to making your years as a physician more effective and meaningful, regardless of length of service. Face how the years have affected your life, body, and ideas. Minimize the need to be like anyone else. You don’t know what that Ecuadorian lived through before applying to medical school as the first doctor in his family, nor does he know what this older woman experienced growing up in America before making her application.
I have gone through the medical admissions process twice over the age of 30 and my experience has led me to believe that medical schools admissions are incubators of prejudice and discrimination. What the author experienced here was unethical treatment by the admissions committees but it may be legal if the employment statutes are applied to admissions. Generally, in employment cases, you have to be over 40 to claim discrimination.
Some medical schools and health care facilities attempt to defend their intentional discrimination by citing the needs of the public. Recently, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals flatly rejected the argument that the patient’s racial preference could be used as a pretext to change employment decisions and assignments. Unfortunately, the medical community is still clinging to this perverse logic because they are trained to make the comfort of the patient a top priority. The patient’s comfort cannot legally control the outcome of certain situations. I encourage any medical professional who has been reassigned based on the bias and prejudice of a patient to file a complaint with the Dept. of Civil Rights. In addition, the disparity in racial representation in the physician work force cannot be used as a defense against racially discriminatory practices in medical school admissions. Racial balancing is illegal.
My perception is that the elite nature of medical education has led admissions professionals to believe that they can use immutable characteristics as factors in an admission decisions because it is their right to engineer the health care community according to a pre-determined goal of proportional representation. If you take a look at the publication entitled “Diversity in Medical Education” released by the AAMC, what you will find are tables and tables of racial percentages and woeful complaints about “under-representation”. The impression one gets is of a system where “diversity” is a euphemism for “racial balance”. Some skin colors are worth more than others.
The racial discrimination is astounding. The AAMC recently released statistics (available here: https://www.aamc.org/data/facts/applicantmatriculant/157998/mcat-gpa-grid-by-selected-race-ethnicity.html) that point to systemic racial discrimination in the consideration of a given applicant’s admissions disposition. I have filed two complaints with the Department of Education Civil Rights Division and they did not investigate further. Once I saw that the racial discrimination was increasing, I wrote them a 6-page letter documenting racially charged, arguably discriminatory statements at UCSF as a final plea for them to investigate the use of race further.
I then contacted the United States Commission on Civil Rights and asked them to encourage the Dept of Education to investigate the racially discriminatory numerical evidence. When I requested these statistics from the AAMC so that I could see school-specific (and not aggregated) data, they told me they had that data but would not give it to me.
I will be setting up a website as a tool to document racial discrimination in medical schools and will return with that address when I am finished.
I am sorry to hear what happened to Jessica S. It should not be the applicant’s burden to convince an admissions why they should not engage in discriminatory practices.
Best of luck,
Matthew Boddum