The Interview: Part Uno

Med school interviews are hilariously like the Miss America pageant for nerds. We all don our best dress attire, which of course means our most boring. God forbid we ruffle the feathers of a 200 year history of medical education by wearing a pin striped shirt or letting our peepee dangle out. Once we look our most funeral like, we get together with the other contestants, and, even though we are all highly qualified just by the sheer fact that we made it past premed, the mcat, primary applications, secondary applications, and to the interview, you spend most of your time with a fake smile asking where everyone is from and then trying as hard as you can to judge this person with such force that their stats as an applicant will explode from their head like a piñata.

You then sit in a waiting room for what can be hours, waiting to get called for an interview. The staff will often tell you in the polite accent of their region that you can get up and explore or use the internet in the library and of course not one person moves, not even molecularly. You can see people actually defying their own physiology and stopping their heart from beating lest a systole be construed as an applicant indicating their dissatisfaction with the current situation of sitting statue like in a chair while the sweat swells in their armpits, forming small bodies of water. And as chummy as you get with the other applicants by the end of an often 6 hour excursion, as soon as they pull up that statistic that essentially says 1 in 2 of those interviewed get acceptances you consider the pros and cons of pulling the staple out of your financial aid packet and turning the guy next to you into a sieve. Of course you don't because you are there to help people, not turn them into devices for straining pasta, but thoughts of that sort often cross your mind.

Finally, you get called to the actual interview. This process ranges from being taken to a room a few feet from the waiting room to being given a room number and asked to go find the room with directions that were modeled after those given to Columbus to find India. The interview room, if not close, is often in the affiliated hospital. If you have ever been to a hospital, you know that they all follow the same basic architectural design originally given to the Minotaur. More to come.