A Humanities Path to Medical School, on the Second Try

The starting point

Simran came to medicine through the humanities, by way of a master's in narrative medicine at Columbia. It is an unusual route, and it made her a strong writer long before it made her a competitive applicant. Her first cycle did not work out.

What changed

She had also worked with another admissions company, and the comparison is what she is clearest about. Their editor was an English professor, which sounds like a good fit for a humanities applicant and was not: she already wrote well, and what she actually needed was to write for a science reader, because her writing ran abstract. Scholr's editors were closer to the people who would be reading her application.

The rest of that comparison was administrative. After the sales pitch, the other company's emails read like templates with her name inserted, and she felt like one of a million students on a list.

What she singles out at Scholr is the committee review: several people reading the same essay, one reviewer replying to another's comment to agree, which she found genuinely reassuring rather than just thorough. Her interview practice ran through a group of mentors rather than one.

The result

Simran was accepted to McMaster. Asked whether she would recommend Scholr to someone else, her answer was one word: 100%. What she says about the people is the part worth quoting: she would still want to email the mentors she worked with years into her career, which she calls a testament to how invested they were in her.