Acceptance Story: Interview #2

About two weeks after my Interview at PCOM-Ga we traveled to the Harrogate (middle of nowhere) TN for my second interview.  Prior to the interview we had not considered this school to be our first choice.  In fact it we saw it more as a back up plan if not the worse case scenario (of course the actual worst case scenario would have been not getting in anywhere).  There were several reasons that we did not consider this school to be ideal.  First it was an hour farther away than Atlanta, and it was also a very new school that had only opened in 2007.  This newness led to many other concerns such as would the faculty be adequate, would the curriculum have all of the kinks worked out, or would they have strong hospital affiliations.  Also, this school had never even had a graduating class, so we had no idea how they would do in the residency match.  However, for some reason Brooke and I had began to have more positive feelings in the week leading up to the interview, and we decided to go there with an open mind and truly give the school a fair chance. 

This interview began at 8AM on Monday so we drove up on Sun. and got to have dinner with some current students that night.  The conversation at dinner was very informative and we began to get a sense that this school had an extremely supportive student body and faculty.  I had not been too keyed up for this interview until we met the students at dinner, and then I began to get really nervous.  I did not sleep well and was so afraid I had not prepared well enough that I had Brooke asking me possible interview questions at 2:30 in the morning as we laid wide awake in bed.  This was a closed file interview so it was up to me to remember everything I wanted to mention and not freeze up due to nerves. 

Finally, morning came and we took the shuttle bus over to the school at the suggestion of the students from the night before.  I'll try to be brief, but the whole interview was great.  As soon as we entered the building we were greeted by the dean coming downstairs and then were escorted into a large conference room for about an hour of presentations.  We got face time with the financial aide officer, dean of the science curriculum, dean of the clinical curriculum, and even met and introduced ourselves to the namesake of the school.  Brooke was allowed to sit through each of these presentations.  Next came my interview and I felt it went really well.  It was the same format as my first interview (one DO and one PhD) except this was closed file.  Answers seemed to come to me quickly and without much hesitation and before I knew it I was being escorted back downstairs.  We were told that the committee would probably meet later that week and we could hear something as early as the next week. 

The rest of the day was very enjoyable because we could all relax a little bit.  We got an extensive tour of the facilities ( and WOW what facilities), a nice lunch in the campus cafeteria (Brooke was welcomed), and then a tour of the campus, medical apartments, and nearby town of Cumberland Gap (complete with the information that the town mechanic was also the mayor) from Bob, the shuttle driver.  Finally, it was over.  Bob dropped us back at the hotel about 1:30PM and we changed clothes and hit the road.

On our way home we discussed the pros and cons of both schools and drafted thank you notes for some of the people who had made our visit to LMU an enjoyable experience.  Overall we had a great day and came away being more impressed with the school than we previously would have thought.  Everyone was friendly, welcoming, sincere and the facilities were absolutely outstanding (more on that in future posts).  However, as Andrew commented on the last post, facilities are not necessarily the most important thing so I didn't want to put too much emphasis on that.  Although I have to admit the thought of driving up that big beautiful building on hill surrounded by mountains was pretty inviting.  We new though that in some ways it didn't matter what our pros and con list looked like until we had actually been accepted, so there was really not much to do but wait.  

So we waited and hoped we would have an answer from both schools before Thanksgiving.