Hi Thanh, of course! Feel free to email me, [email protected]. Best, Kenneth.

Yes, we can! On it!

Yes, we can! On it!

Thanks for the question! I think you should explore opportunities that expose you to clinical medicine to better gauge your desire for medicine and patient care. I think that will be helpful both in motivating yourself as well figuring out a career that you would wish to pursue.

Glad you enjoyed it!

Hey Noelle! So glad you reached out :) To prepare for the PhD side of MD-PhD interviews, I liked to read through my faculty interviewers biography and the abstract of a few of their papers. You definitely don't need to read the text of papers or understand everything, but I think it's great to note down a few of their recent research topics and some questions you might have. I kept these on a Google doc and would re-read them right before talking to the PI. You can usually request which PIs you want to talk to, so this is a great chance to get to know more about the research at that institution and potential future supervisors. For the MD side of things, I found it most helpful to do a mock virtual interview with my pre-med advisor. Just going through the process of having someone else ask me questions helped me clarify my thoughts and improve my communication style. For MMI, I also did a few practice scenarios with one of my good friends and this helped me bounce ideas off of him and learn from how he approached problems and vice versa. I also id practice my answers to a few questions that I knew were likely to come up again and again, such as "tell me about yourself" and "why medicine?" just because these are very open-ended questions and I didn't want my answer to become too long-winded in the actual interview. Overall, I found the MD side of interviews to be a lot about just getting to know the applicants, so in that sense it's almost easier to prepare for than the PhD side of things because you just have to talk about yourself! Express enthusiasm about the opportunity an MD-PhD provides, speak genuinely about your interests, and be kind, and I think you're well on your way to nailing the interview! - Maya

In addition to what Maya has already mentioned, I would recommend checking out the session that the American Physician Scientists Association (APSA) is hosting on Thursday, Aug 27th at 7 PM EDT regarding interviews. It will be a great resource! -Kenneth "Bring your questions and concerns to ask current program directors who will be discussing key information about how programs are adapting interviews due to the pandemic. Our four program director panelists will be: Dr. Hossein Ardehali, MD PhD from Northwestern University's MD-PhD program; Dr. Brian Schutte, PhD from Michigan State University's DO-PhD program; Dr. Patrice Spitalnik, MD from Columbia University's MD-PhD program; Dr. Todd Vanderah, PhD from the University of Arizona, Tucson's MD-PhD program" www.physicianscientists.org/events/EventDetails.aspx?id=1408680

@@journeytothedoubledoc9856 thanks so much you guys!!!

You’re definitely right that the undergrad institution diversity of MD-PhD programs is not where it needs to be right now. It’s hard to know for sure why this is, but we would guess that a large part of the reason why ivy league/big name schools are overrepresented is that they tend to be research-focused institutions, making it easy for undergrads to get research opportunities and therefore exposure to the MD-PhD path. With that said, absolutely no MD-PhD programs are closed to anyone because they went to a state school! There are people starting in both of our programs from state schools and this has been true every year. Ultimately, all any of us can do to be a successful applicant is show that we made the most out of the opportunities we had and actively sought out ways to expand our horizons, do good research and clinical work, give back to the community, and grow as a person (cliche but true!). If there’s anything in specific that you feel that your school doesn’t provide, let us know and we can help brainstorm solutions. For example, some students feel that their school does not provide great research opportunities in their field of interests, so we can help identify summer research programs (REUs) or post-bac programs (ex: NIH IRTA) that might be of interest in bridging that gap! Lastly, we also recognize that this has not been our experience as we both went to Columbia for undergrad, and we would also love to help connect you to current MD-PhD students that have went to state schools or can speak to other things you are interested in! Check out this awesome tweet from @BriChristophers where MD-PhDs offer their contact info to talk about the various paths they took: twitter.com/BriChristophers/status/1259910431440662528 😊 We hope this helps and we’re happy to talk more 1:1 about this as well (contact info in video description) because we think that the relative lack of diversity in MD-PhD program matriculants, even compared to MD programs, is something we all need to discuss and change!

Thank you, that definitely makes a lot of sense! I have done a good amount of research at my institution but it does get intimidating as you start to compare yourself to other students who did go to more competitive universities. I would love to connect with both of you, I’ll follow your social media’s!

@@KryztalPena Awesome! Also, sorry, meant to comment the answer above to your original comment question!

So glad to count you among our audience. Feel free to reach out if you have anything specific you want us to cover!