So I haven’t written much in the last week, primarily because I had been busy finishing my Ontario medical school applications. For those of you who don’t know, it is a pretty lengthy process, requiring an autobiographical sketch listing up to 48 items to describe yourself, a 1,000 word essay for the University of Toronto, and answering five short questions for McMaster University, among other things. It is done through OMSAS: the Ontario Medical School Application Service.

It’s amazing how much your feelings and emotions can change in such a short period of time. Life really is a roller coaster; not only throughout your entire life, but sometimes even within the period of a single day.

I woke up yesterday 11:00 a.m., determined to finish my application and submit it by the afternoon (Note: The application was due today 4:30 pm, so I was not a complete procrastinate for once!). I worked for about 6-7 hours straight, touching up my essays, revising, double-checking everything, etc.etc. After a huge surge of adrenaline, I was finally very happy with what I had produced in terms of my essay answers, as that is probably the hardest part of the application. Considering I hadn’t written things like this since Grade 12, it felt pretty good to get rid of the rustiness and actually let loose.

Success!

So I clicked submit at about 7pm, feeling super happy and relieved that I was not only able to put together an application I was very proud of, I did it with a whole day to spare! So to celebrate, my family took me out for a nice dinner. Yum steak.

Anyways, so I get home maybe two hours or so later, and start randomly reading some premed student forums online (keener much?). And I read this post by a student who was panicking about forgetting to fill out some prerequisite course information for the University of Ottawa. And then I started panicking too. Why? Because I had no idea what he/she was talking about!

Oh Crap…

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University life is starting to take its toll a bit. Between classes and the time it takes for transportation, I feel like there’s not very much time left each day. It also doesn’t help that I have morning classes, and well I’m not a morning person, so I don’t get enough sleep everyday and wind up very tired at the end of the day.

So if I was awake I would definitely have time to write a few things, but I don’t write particularly well when I’m tired (who does?), and I think the readers deserve more than some tired attempt if I’m trying to provide something useful!

I appreciate all the comments so far from everyone. You are all very kind, and I appreciate that, as well as all your suggestions for future topics.

I’m looking to have How to Write a Winning Scholarship Essay Part 3: Writing the Essay up by this Friday evening.

Also, with the release of the Loran Award Application and the TD Scholarship deadlines coming up soon, I would like to have an article up soon for advice for each of those particular applications.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about applying to universities, which programs to select, etc. so I will be trying to get some good articles up about that in October/November, since I know those of you graduating will need to be making some crucial decisions soon.

Hope everyone’s first week of school went well!

Sorry for the lack of writing the past few days! My internet has been down since Friday, but it seems to be fine now.

So today was the first day of my 3rd year of Biomedical Sciences at York. I had been living on campus during my first two years, but decided to save some money and commute this year. I had been commuting home during the summer from York (because of my NSERC research job), but I had yet to experience the morning ride to York, especially during the regular school year.

Wow. Talk about a long ride. It took about 1 hour and 30 minutes to get to York by bus this morning. I find the bus kind of boring, since I don’t have anyone to talk to on my route. And since I get bored pretty easily in general… bad combination.

First class today was BIOL 3010: Advanced Biochemistry. Basically the entire course is about metabolism. Metabolism of beer, metabolism of poisons, metabolism of amino acids, etc. etc., it’s all on the course syllabus. Yay fun… (sarcasm for the gullible) Anyways, the professor was actually a pretty funny, laid back guy. Which is usually good, except for some reason, that always means harder tests. We’ll see I guess…

Second class was GEOG 1000: World Regional Geography. This course is kind of weird… the lectures apparently are going to be full of random stories and geographical history, and will often be biased (their words, not mine). Oh, and there is a map quiz where in a past year, students had to draw the entire map for a region from scratch. Umm yah, interesting…

Third (and last) class for today was PHIL 2060: Social and Political Philosophy. I’m probably not going to look forward to reading the material (because I tried that last year with this kind of philosophical stuff, and well sorry, I learned English in the 20th century, not the 17th…). But I do enjoy the concepts, and the professor seems very interesting and like he understands the stuff (and philosophy in general, which is kinda important). Not looking forward to the two essays, but pretty sure I’ll find the material very interesting.

Pretty happy in general that none of my professors decided to actually teach much today. I had that once for last year, and well, that wasn’t fun… hard to take class seriously on the first day.

Tomorrow I have Processes of Evolution and Molecular Biology I…. super happy to only have two classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays!

Sorry for having no new articles up yet. I have a few in mind though, plus finishing up the Scholarship Essay series. I hoped to have that finished by the end of this week, but writing that piece is taking longer than I thought.

I think I’m going to write an interesting article for tomorrow about the importance of “making sense”. This is a super important and powerful concept, hopefully you find it interesting and useful.

Hope everyone had a good first day of school! =)

I started my personal essay for U of T’s medical school late last week. Before this summer, I thought this was actually going to be a breeze for me. I have a ton of application/essay writing experience, but what I didn’t expect was how rusty I was going to be with this. In addition, writing essays for medical school is much different than scholarship/program applications. That being said, my overall approach is very much the same.

Anyways, so I started with a first draft, and I had a general idea of what type of message/theme I wanted to convey. But after two days of writing it, I was pretty frustrated, because I thought it was pretty awful. The ideas did not mesh too well and the flow was not great, in my opinion. And if the flow isn’t good, the essay isn’t good. So I took a break for one day.

After that break, I started thinking a bit more about the essay, and I realized the problem: I strayed away from the overall theme I had decided upon beforehand. I tried to include too many things, and frankly, you just can’t do that. You need to include things that make sense as part of your theme. You’re going to have to sacrifice some things, but the idea is that you’re not trying to tell your life story. You’re trying to tell that small bit of your life that relates to your path to medicine.

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Hey everyone,

I’ve wanted to start a blog for the longest time. I feel like I kept a mini-blog with all those random notes I had on my Facebook page, but officially having one is kinda cool now.

So what’s this blog going to be about?

Well, the title gives some of it away, but not all of it. As many of my friends/family know, I will be applying to medical school this fall. So this blog will sort of track my journey through the admissions process.

But more than that, this will be a place for me to share my random wacky thoughts about anything from my radical views on education (and how we shouldn’t do half the things we are currently doing now), to how How I Met Your Mother is easily the best show on television (which you should check out obv).

In addition, I will also sporadically write some articles on various things for students in high school as well as undergraduate science (anything from applying for scholarships to picking universities/colleges). I’ve thought long and hard about many of these tough decisions students have to make, and feel like I have a strong grasp of what’s best to do in a lot of the situations you face as a growing student. I’d like to share everything I’ve ever learned with you. Why? Well I love teaching and mentoring, and I love to write – so I feel like, why not combine two things I really, really love?

Oh yah, should also mention something neat. My older brother, Jerome, will also be blogging here. He will be starting his 1st year of medical school at the University of Toronto this fall. He’ll be sharing his experience with that here, as well as other random junk in his life. I think some of you premed students who want a better idea of what medical school is like will find his posts really interesting.

Anyways, gonna jet now. But if you have any suggestions of topics you’d like me to write about in the future, lemme know!