Non Resident

For the last year or so I have been considering a career change from Electrical Engineering to Medicine, so last summer after leaving Salt Lake City to move to Seattle I wrote the MCATs and applied to the UW School of Medicine. I was pretty confident in my application since I had done well on the MCATs, I had taken most of the supplementary courses required that were not present from my engineering education, and I had done some other activities like volunteering. The UW Medical School has a strong preference for in-state applicants, non-residents are only considered if they come from a disadvantaged background (I grew up in Ontario without a mountain in sight, does that count?) or show a desire to live and work in rural areas (no thanks!).

I thought this wouldn't be a problem since we moved to Seattle in July which put me here one year in advance of when I would have started classes, which would classify me as a resident by the time classes started. However, it turns out that to be considered as a resident for application purposes, you need to have been here for 6 months prior to the application deadline. We moved here in time to meet that deadline, but I kept my job at the University of Utah until August 14, flying back during the week and staying with friends (Mike and Laura, who were amazing hosts). I found out a few weeks ago that my application for residence status had been turned down because of this, as it constituted a legal tie to Utah within the 6 month window.

This was a bummer as it meant my application was dead in the water before it could even be considered on grounds of academic merit and my other activities. There were still a few other avenues to pursue, so I appealed both to the Registrar's Office (to reverse the decision on my residency) and to the Medical School (to ignore the decision by the registrar's office on my residency). I found out this week that both of these appeals had been denied, so my final slim chance was to change my application to that of a non-resident and then show up for my interview in a cowboy hat and overalls as demonstration of my desire to live in a rural setting. However, I was not given the chance to try this approach, as I found out yesterday that my non-resident application was turned down without even a request to fill out a supplemental application.

So there you have it. It was a bit disappointing to get this news since I have done a lot in the past year towards putting in this application, but on the positive side I am still not 100% decided about whether I want to go through with this so it will give me another year to think about it.

Weight: 164.4