Cliff notes for those who just want the raw results: I was accepted to the University of Toronto and McMaster University, and was waitlisted at Queen’s University.
As you all already know, I got into medical school on Friday! Unfortunately, I was out almost the entire day so I didn’t get the time to write much in depth. So for those of you interested, I wanted to give a little rundown on how the whole day went.
The night before, I had stayed up till about 2 am before finally just giving up and going to bed. Originally, I figured I would be full of anxiety and would end up staying up all night long – but I wasn’t as nervous was I thought I would be. In all honesty, I didn’t really feel that anxious until I woke up yesterday morning around 6 a.m.
Medical school offers are one of those things that take a really long time. The admissions process itself starts way back in September, and if you’re fortunate enough to be offered an interview, you don’t find out your status until mid-May. And if you consider that many people begin thinking about and preparing for medical school years in advance of that, and some times you end up applying multiple times, the journey can be quite long and strenuous.
I can’t really remember what I was thinking at 6 a.m. But I remember getting out of bed, and checking my email just for the heck of it. I had left my laptop on overnight with my email open so I could check right away in the morning. Of course, I didn’t expect to see anything at that time. Everything I had read and heard pointed to the emails coming no earlier than 8:45am or so. And just as expected, there was nothing there yet. So I proceeded to try and go back to sleep, planning to just wake up at 8:00am and check again. But I ended up twisting and turning in bed, genuinely nervous for the first time about this. To be honest, I was actually more nervous the hours before I got my MCAT score back – the thought of having to study for that beast of a test again is the most scary thing ever in my opinion.
In any case, around 6:45am I still couldn’t sleep, so I decided to go surf the web for a bit. Like I said, my email had been open since the night before, and I had to collect myself for a bit. And staring back at me, in bold font against a white background like any new message in Gmail, were the words: