Pre-Med in COVID – Transcript

[00:04] Torah: Welcome to the Prep Me podcast. The only podcast specifically for Canadian pre-med students. I’m Torah. And with me is my regular co-host Chansey Veinotte.

[00:14] Chansey: Hello everybody.

[00:15] Torah: First of all, before we dig in today to today’s topic, we want to give our sponsor a quick but important shout out. Prep101 is our sponsor. They are the most comprehensive MCAT test prep company out there. They’ll get you ready for the most important test of your life. Now, today we are focusing on something that is on everyone’s minds when they’re applying into medicine at this particular time in our lives, which is applying to medicine in COVID. Now there’s lots to cover today. I know there are lots of questions that we want to talk about, and thankfully Chansey has been sitting in meeting after meeting, after meeting discussing what to do about applications in COVID with his respective institutions. He’s over at the University of Ottawa. So Chansey, I want to start right off the bat with saying the most important I think question I keep getting from students all across the country is how do I get clinical experience in COVID?

[01:06] Chancey: Oh my gosh. And that’s like every single student who’s interested in medicine, because everyone is panicked that the opportunities and the doors are closed. And I think we understand why because of what we’re living in right now. But it’s certainly overwhelming when you look at all these medical applications that have little boxes and mini autobiography input platforms for medical experience that we aren’t getting right now. So I think it’s a super duper common question and I just want students and listeners to know that it’s not just you that’s on sort of the panic and concern side. It’s also the institution saying like, yeah, we still want that experience, but we understand that our students and our applicants are not going to be able to get it. So what we’re trying to do is obviously we look forward to the future and I can only speak to, a little bit on Ottawa, a little bit on the east coast, but there are lots of forums I’m involved with too, even just online hearing what people are talking about, administrative bodies residents, we all speak about it.

[01:59] And I think what we’re going to see is sort of an emphasis on repartitioning the points that would normally go towards medically relevant experience on an applicant’s application, being redistributed to other areas and not necessarily creating new boxes, but redistributing to other areas of the autobiography. So your community, your volunteer, your work, as well as looking into giving more sort of points to be awarded to the interview to your statement of interest. So rather than those points going away and being like a zero to anyone who doesn’t have medical experience, there’s going to be a way to sort of on applications, notify that, hey COVID certainly impacted my ability to get involved and to bank some medically relevant experience just because the opportunities weren’t there and for us and if I’m on the admissions committee and I see that, it just makes me think with a new lens of, okay, maybe I’m going to view this application under bracket B versus bracket A because of the experiences that they’re saying they do or do not have.

[02:55] Torah: What if you do have medically relevant clinical experience, maybe you did volunteer in a COVID clinic or I don’t know. I mean, so are those points lost for the students that actually got in?

[03:07] Chansey: No and I don’t think they ever would be because, and this is not every school of listeners, this is essentially just brainstorming. What do we do in the coming one to two years when we really see this as being sort of a glaring concern on applications for both applicant and institution? I think it’s totally fine if you do have experience. Just the brain child or what we’re thinking is, do we give sort of, you can apply under the umbrella of application A, where I do not have medically relevant experience in the last two to three years due to COVID versus applicant B maybe who I had experienced prior to COVID and I was involved during COVID and I’d like to use it towards my application and that’s fine too.

[03:43] It’s just a question of whether or not in that bracket B if you were completely on a different sort of grading scheme for your application or will your medically relevant experience be seen almost like a bonus point or additional points to your application because it’s super valid if you’ve been involved in the pandemic response, rather if you are at a screening center or if you’re being a volunteer porter in hospitals, getting patients from point A to point B and trying not to increase foot traffic or over travel within the hospital. That’s fantastic because you’re actually in the setting and you may think I’m not with patients, but you are with patients and you’re seeing everything around you and you’re living the pandemic outside of just your living room and your bedroom, which a lot of people are doing, which is great, because we don’t want people out. But at the same time, if you’re even involved in your community in a capacity that you normally wouldn’t be involved, with helping a local business, helping a local charity when they too are stressed in times of COVID, that’s going to be a new experience for everybody that we haven’t seen in years. And we will certainly value that as it relates to points in grading and overall composite scoring.

[04:44] Torah: I mean there still are just more precious clinical experiences available. Let’s back up and say, how do you even begin to get any clinical experience of the tiny nuggets that are out there right now because of COVID has limited so much. So how you go about even finding that stuff?

[05:04] Chansey: Yeah, definitely. I think the biggest avenues, other than going, there are tons of private and non for profit organizations that you really just have to reach out to, whether it be like Canadian cancer society or [05:16 inaudible] Canada or heart and stroke, local hospices, local elderly care facilities, local clinics, you just have to reach out. And at this point it’s going to be either by phone or by email because we’re trying to avoid that in contact. But honestly, you know an avenue that is still ongoing that people don’t necessarily think about would be actually writing the medical school you’re applying to or medical schools where you live and asking for opportunities to be involved with their education or educational curriculum where you can actually be involved in OSCEs. They’re still happening on zoom. They’re still looking for simulated patients and sort of mock patient volunteers and people to help work the zoom sort of getting med student from room one to room two where admins, maybe they’re getting better at zoom. But a lot of the younger population that’s applying to medicine is certainly well versed in the technology. So there’s these avenues that people have never even thought to consider as medically relevant, including just helping the school you’re applying to, which is a nice bonus because it’s medically relevant. They show that you are invested in their school and their sort of objective at the same time.

[06:16] Torah:  And you get that backdoor view of what an interview and what the OSCEs are like and what those kinds of things are like, that would be so much fun.

[06:25] Chansey: Yeah. And people and unless you hear like me or you Torah speak about it, a lot of people never even hear that this is an opportunity for someone who’s an undergrad or someone who’s in grad school, that has never sort of, until applying for medicine, been within that world to overhear that, oh, this is an opportunity for me. So this is the kind of stuff I want to get out. And I think we could speak to 20, 30 different ways to be clinically involved, but there are probably hundreds of ways that are just like naïve to me in the moment that I would still consider medically relevant on an application. It’s not just Torah observed Dr. Smith in her clinic for four weeks straight an hour a day. Yeah, sure. That’s medically relevant, but so is going to be, Torah was involved two hours a week in helping medical school OSCEs or medical school exams or medical training, volunteering to be an altar sonographer step in meaning I’ll let people examine my abdomen. I’m just going to go and lay there. I’ll get a little bit of training as to what to do, but I’m just there to be a person that they can put an ultrasound probe on. That’s still fantastic involvement because you’re investing in the medical education of maybe even the school you want to apply to.

[07:30] Torah: Those are all kinds of things I never really thought of and think about now, even in COVID. And I know that there’s been talk of a lot of that kind of hands on experience being limited, even in those ultrasound tech training programs and stuff like that, but they have to still be kind of out there. Right?

[07:49] Chansey: No, definitely. And I think we’re in a good spot now, we’re going to see more of it, which I guess if you’re involved in the active cycle now or the next one, there could still be a lull in opportunities, but there are so many opportunities that you will never hear about until you’re listening to, podcast like this really reaching out and putting in the effort. So you need to contact people and it will start at the undergraduate level messaging sort of not even admissions offices, but messaging the undergraduate or the postgraduate offices of medical schools, because they’re the ones that are going to have the tethers to the instructors that need help in this area or the physicians that want help with OSCEs in that area. If this is something that listeners are interested in, in terms of get me in med school without having to be in med school yet, because then I’m just going to get more experience and see if I’m going to like that world or not.

[08:32] Torah: Yeah. I love that. And then I want to ask you and I want to pick your brain about what the conversations are around something that is near and dear to my heart. And I’m trying not to get angry, which is the credit no credit that happened in 2020. I was so mad. The backstory is I was teaching bio 201, cell biology at the U of A, teaching other couple of courses. And right before the shutdown, it was like Thursday morning 8:00 AM was my class. When I walked into class, I was like, Hey everyone, like, I don’t think we’re going to make it until our midterm, which is scheduled for the Tuesday. Like there’s this pandemic. The students were really funny because their head down getting their undergrad done and they kinda looked up and was like, what pandemic, what, what? They started freaking out.

[09:18] I’m like, there’s a thing, a virus and it’s like bad. And I think we’re going to shut down the university and I just want to prep you. And I felt really bad because I was the bearer of bad news. So then of course on that Friday, the U of A goes, we’re shutting down and we’re going online. So I spend, I can’t explain to you how many hours trying to figure out how to put for the first time, a second year cell biology exam online through our portal. And it went smoothly. During the exam on the Tuesday at 8:00 AM. Just after lockdown. I get an email from the university saying, if you have any assessments plan this week, can you please halt them? I wrote back the most aggressive email. I thought I was going to get fired because I was like, I have a midterm happening right now.

[10:09] My students have worked their asses off and we are going to get this done and it’s going to be representative exactly of what they’re capable of. Fast forward a couple weeks. And the university goes, oh actually we’re going to credit no credit. In the meantime I have been just motivating and getting buy in from my students that we can do this. We can get a grade at the end of this online learning that is representative of their place in the class and they busted their butts, we all did. And then to have that just fall off the map and get credit, no credit. I was livid. My husband was like, can you please stop swearing?

[10:53] Chansey: You’re so angry. You’re just so angry.

[10:56] Torah: I was there for my students like this is ridiculous. This is a class that means a lot to students. It’s hard. It’s really important as a second year class to guide and plan their futures. So here I have a cohort of students and we have a lot of them, [11:14 inaudible] did something similar. I know lots of schools did it, went to credit, no credit. What the heck do you do with an entire semester’s worth of NCs and Cs and nothing to show for it?

[11:26] Chansey: Yeah. A hundred percent. And I think it’s terrible and it’s super stressful and ways I’m glad. And I sympathize with those that were in that environment because that is super stressful, especially when you’re not only thinking like medicine, our topic, you’re just thinking about getting through undergrad and what does that mean at the end of my degree, how are professional program going to look at it, medicine sort of on the wayside. For me thinking from a medical lens, like what does that mean for an application? The same stress, like I said earlier, even with medical involvement is still felt on both ends. It’s the stress of the evaluators and these admissions committees thinking, you know, gosh, what are we going to do? Like how can we, yes, we’ve got the MCAT as sort of more of a standardized way to gauge academic potential, but looking and appraising GPAs is going to be so tough because now we’ve got this mix of letter and numeric grades and then now we’ve got our NCs and Cs, similar to in ways a lot of schools may have like their pass, their no pass or their incompletes or their withdrew, all those other letters that are associated with levels of completion.

[12:27] So what’s happening. And again, it’s school by school right now though we do talk and schools and institutions do talk is whether or not you have to change and give options again in terms of a GPA schema. So you apply to medicine and then maybe you say, okay, depending on where you are in your degree, if you were impacted by something like credit, no credit or an area where you weren’t able to take a full course load, let’s say even that, schools may be able to say, okay, you know what we’ll do. We’ll evaluate and determine a cumulative GPA for just two consecutive years of study, but not limit those two years to be third and fourth year, right before medicine. Maybe we’ll consider the first and second or we’ll take everything you have. And we’ll essentially put weight on the numeric rates we do have and say, this is the credit hours that go with those particular grades, the numbers and the numerics as well. With how we handle the Cs versus the NCs, sort of in and of themselves, it’s really to be determined.

[13:24] And I think it’s going to be more so that we see that you do have the credits that you need going forth to just get your degree and that, you know what, we’re going to get a score for GPA, how we’re going to get it? To be determined, every school will be different in terms of what they do for their schematics. And you may even see their cutoffs change to that regard as well. Understanding that first and second year university for many is typically not the strong years, not the years that contribute to that 3.8 or let’s say 3.9 out of 4.0 GPA. So the cutoffs, there’s talk of them changing, maybe getting a bit more weight to something like the MCAT, which we can continue to study and do on our own time that isn’t as hindered by COVID, other than maybe testing center dates, we can go forth in that manner.

[14:03] But the other thing will be just, it’s conditional on completing your degree and whatever the university decides, you need to complete your degree in the times of COVID, as long as you have it, we’re going to give you that application sort of approval to send it into us. And if we give you a seat, you can still come in the fall. So that’s still all unchanged, but in terms of this is what every school’s going to do with credit, no credit, it’s still up in the air to be completely honest, it’s wild. I think everyone’s sort of just kind of not panicked by it, but trying to do the right thing so that it impacts sort of a better cohort or a larger cohort than just the one individual who has, I’ve got seven NCs, I’ve got one C or whatever the situation should be.

[14:42] Torah: Yeah. And I think, I’m going to just kind of be a little bit of a devil’s advocate. You mean the schools haven’t figured it out yet? What about the students that applied in 2021? They would’ve had those on the transcript. So why isn’t this been figured out yet?

[14:59] Chansey: Yeah. And I think right now for those students, what I’m hearing is that they are being seen as sort of a, we’ll look at everything you have, we’re going to look at all years and a lot of schools don’t have those brackets and those schemes developed yet. It’s just conversational as to what’s the best way to be able to acknowledge merit in sort of that GPA success, but also get enough information so that we can actually gauge GPA success in terms of how they put in. It’s just, we think of numbers and numerics and letters, which is a great, but as you know Torah and the instructors would know, we also thinking of like course hours, how many hours have you put in because to calculate a GPA? I need the letter, but I need the hours that went with that letter. And I need accumulative to give me near a full course load or a 75% course load for some people in the times of the pandemic.

[15:43] So yes, it’s happening. There are still people applying to medicine because believe it or not, we still need doctors. Even in a COVID year, we can’t stop training. But it really just skews the application to be okay, you know what? We’ll figure out GPA the best that we can, we will be understanding to this, the credit, no credit because it’s out of the students hands. We’ll grade them on the years they have banked and we’ll lower the contribution of GPA towards the overall medical application. It might mean that your GPA, instead of being worth 10 to 15% on an application for medical school is now worth 5 to 7%. And we’re going to interview more people, whether it be through zoom or in person, and we’ll give more weight to the interview. So it’s that redistribution, repartitioning that really everyone’s doing in this particular time while they figure out exactly what does it look like for the years going forward when we start seeing hundreds of applicants, thousands of applicants that have transcripts that are really sort of a mix mode of our traditional numerics and all these Cs and NCs.

[16:37] Torah: Okay. So I want to take a little bit of a break here, because I want to come back to this conversation though, because I want to announce that you are listening to the Prep Me podcast. This podcast is made possible by sponsorship from Prep101 1, it’s Canada’s premier MCAT test prep company. You will definitely not find a company that’s more comprehensive, more prepared and has more experience to prep you for the MCAT, which leads into my next question, which is how much more will the MCAT matter.

[17:05] Chansey: I think it’s going to matter more. And this is sort of, it’s like being the weather man, the weather woman, who’s trying to predict what’s going to happen tomorrow. And it’s so, so tough, but it’s the obvious academic area that we could certainly put a bit more points for because of the feasibility of doing the MCAT, even in COVID times or at least being able to study for it. And because it is a standard means to compare applicant to applicant, regardless of if you’re English major or if you’re in biology or if you’re 10 years out of school going back to medicine as a second career. So I think it will and the murmurings are that it will, but will it be like it was 5% and now it’s 20. I think that’s sort of, that would be not impossible, but sort of outrageous to do.

[17:50] It’s more of, do we take the points from something like a GPA that we’re really struggling to determine GPA credit hours for a mark or for a percentage and award those points more towards the MCAT, for instance? So MCATs are typically worth 5 to 10% of an application score at most schools. Certain schools like, McMaster and Queens, the sections that they would involve in the MCAT, they might wait a little bit more, so maybe 15%. You might see it go up by 2.5 to 5% in the total application. So it’s not going to be these huge gains or huge steps, but enough that it should evaluate a bit more academic contribution to the grade or to the MCAT score.

[18:28] Torah: Yeah. I mean, still that little bit matters. That pressure now is wrapped up on the MCAT, as if the MCAT wasn’t hard enough already, now it’s worth just even slightly more makes a difference.

[18:38] Chansey: And it’s so tough because I mean, I imagine, I mean, I’m not an undergraduate student right now, but I mean, I hear from undergraduates on a weekly basis in terms of these types of situations and yes, it’s stressful and yes there’s a lot of uncertainty, but at the same time to the message, I said earlier, med school still need med students, so they’re going to be flexible. And they’re going to be a bit more understanding to the COVID specific situations because yes, COVID is the thing that impacts us all, but the individual, there are so much variability in terms of how it impacted you. Were you able to at your school, maybe you were doing all online and you did all your courses and it was not impacted versus someone who was in person switching between online and then the school shut down. And then I couldn’t complete this. We respect that.

[19:17] Torah: And then you got COVID, which is happening now to a lot of my students, right?

[19:22] Chansey:  And now you’re sick and now you’ve lost that opportunity or you’re away from work or you’re away from your volunteer-ship. There’s a lot of understanding. It means that on our end, it’s a lot more work to go through applications and to sort of understand because we can’t score every single application a different way. It wouldn’t be fair to do so, but I think we also have to be flexible to change sort of the way we look at our rubrics.

[19:41] Torah: Well, that’s nice to hear though. I think that people don’t realize that medical schools are really kind of always stay true to the fact that they’re trying to find the best people and whatever that takes to find the best people. And I think that’s just nice to hear, even from my perspective, who has been around this world for a long time, it’s just kind nice to know that you’re kind of stepping up to bat for the students and saying where can we find these students who have struggled and have had a lot of adversity put in their path? So then the another question is when and where are schools going to announce their adjustments to their various just sort, basically rubric to evaluate applicants.

[20:22] Chansey: Some schools will do like very formal, like news releases, if there are major changes to the way they review applications and you’ll see it like in media outlets. A lot of them will be unfortunately more subtle in the sense that they will literally just do online updates or if they do have like outreached through social media, they’ll do the same, whether it be Instagram, Facebook, you name it. But I think a lot of them will just be through their sort of main portals online. So from the websites for the schools themselves, changing sort of those admission requirements and those subheadings on their site themselves.

[20:55] Torah: Okay, so our application cycle is not right until September, October. So when do you think that the listeners can sort of say, okay, now I have to start looking? We think June, it starts updating and start really kind of, because of course, one of the things we’ve talked about already on the podcast is this idea that choose the school that’s right for you. And these adjustments are going to matter of where, a listener, an applicant is going to be more competitive. So when do we think that we should start reviewing the adjustments that schools are making? I would say June, do we give them until June? Or should it be expect sooner?

[21:35] Chansey: I would expect it sooner. But at the same time, I’m also like, as the person who’s been the student with my five or six schools that I was interested in, I was very like, diligent. And you have to be, because there was a time when I wasn’t and it burned me. So when I was really in it to get a seat, I’m regularly, not hourly, but like a couple times a week, just double checking in with schools, either from their website or writing the admissions contact that I developed from writing the school themselves and asking them, especially in my situation, there was a couple schools that were overhauling their evaluation of grad students, which is what I was. So of course I was invested in knowing, okay, well, what does that mean for me when I’m doing this, like determination of how you review my academics?

[22:14] Is it more advantageous for me to say, oh yes, please give a year of my grad school towards my GPA or will that hurt me? And it’s just bonus points. I’m trying to figure out what schools are doing it. And I don’t think for me, it was until like winter, February, March before they decided on the next application cycle. For this, as soon as they can, like June in my mind is almost a little late, considering how many application cycles open in July. And if you need to change something or invest some level of revision in your own school or your own application, it doesn’t give you a lot of time to do that. But same thing. I mean, I guess I can’t say for sure, but I would hope at least by June you would know via either direct communication or from something like social media or their webpage, what a school has done to revise their application process. That’s the only fair way to do it. They can’t do it in July and August when people are actively applying. So I would think June just sort of the last month they could make a change.

[23:06] Torah: Okay. So bottom line is, schools are trying to be as fair as possible. Given the circumstances they will be as transparent as possible, given the circumstances and the best place to find that is the website starting at the end of the semester. Fair?

[23:19] Chansey: Certainly. And I think folks, what it means too, is just there’s so much more value on reaching out on your own to get your own answers. And don’t rely solely on what you hear from my friend who’s applying or from this one forum. If you are invested and you want to go to this school or that school, please reach out, it’s the best message I could give because as we said, twice already in this podcast, med school still need med students. And of course, as Torah just mentioned, and I echo, they’re going to be flexible to get those good people. They’re not going to shut the door on good people just because they’re like, oh, we don’t want to deal with credits, no credits because it’s not just you it’s a country, it’s a continent. It’s all this huge population of applicants that are all impacted by the same pandemic that you are. So there’s got to be some level of understanding and flexibility.

[24:04] Torah: And I think another wrap up as we as we maybe wrap this this particular episode up is to say that clinical experience can be a lot more creative than people give it credit for. And just saying I’m in the hospital, that is therefore the only way to be get clinical experience, especially in times of COVID where that’s restricted. So hopefully things open up and of course we hope that every listener is getting in and applying and getting in and becoming doctors that keep us out of the next pandemic. Please, can we do that? But in the meantime your clinical experience means interacting with patients in some way and the medical system in some way.

[24:40] Chansey: Hundred percent fair, and the most fair, a hundred percent fair. And I think utilizing platforms like the Prep Me podcast and just being educated and not sitting in a silo and thinking, okay, maybe it won’t impact me. I’ll just sit and wait on my own. And then I’ll just apply. Be active, be an advocate for yourself. And appreciate what we’re talking about in terms of some of the things that once seems so stringent might have a bit more flexibility to them.

[25:06] Well, thank you everyone. Thank you Chansey again for another wonderful podcast. You’re listening to the Prep me podcast. I am Torah and my co-host Chansey Veinotte, whatever way you want to pronounce his last name. It’s good. I do it wrong every single time. I’m just going to call you Chansey. And follow us on your very social media and also on the www.prep101.com/mcat website because Prep101 is our very generous sponsors, and we want to thank them again. So, until next time, ciao.

[25:38] Chansey: See you later now.