When you’re in college, you’re prepping for your future career. You’re setting up everything, so the transition to your job or more schooling goes smoothly and quickly. For us, a major discussion in our relationship concerned Conor’s dream to go onto medical school and the more untraditional route he was going to use to get there. He choose not to take the MCAT immediately so he could study for it and maintain a high GPA, and he decided to pursue a Master’s Degree in BioMedical Sciences. Â While he attended his program, he applied to cycle one for medical schools and unfortunately was denied. This set his schooling and potential admission back by a whole year; this year.
Between the moment that we found out he wouldn’t be attending medical school in Aug 2015 and now (about a year at this point), life has felt like it’s been slowly moving by. Every day since he submitted his cycle two application in May(?), it’s been a daily struggle to stay positive as we await letters and emails for interviews, and then finally the acceptance letter. So slow and very tough days seemed to fill our weeks, months and year.
When you begin the medical school process and start applying to the cycles, life literally slows down and is put on hold, or at least it was to an extent for us. I agreed to be flexible in my career path and aspirations so we can make sure that he gets to medschool as soon as possible. I’ll discuss the how we decided this another time since it’s something that most people disapprove of.
Anyhow, for the past year, things have been feeling very slow and between quitting my job, going back to school and Conor getting an in between job while we wait for potential interviews. I’m a planner by nature, so you can only imagine the stress I feel when I have to push plans back or rush to move them up. I personally cannot imagine how Conor has been feeling all this time just waiting and waiting for decisions to be made. After all this time I’ve done my best to take care of him and support him through this long long journey.
We got married this past October which was and is a huge milestone in our life, but I still felt like we were floating along in limbo, just waiting to know where we’ll be for the next 4 or 5 years. Mid December, Conor got an incredible early Christmas gift. It was an interview at his top school PCOM. The interview was scheduled for January and it came up really quick. He prepped and prepared for the interview daily and before we realized it, I was dropping him off at the school. His first cycle, he was given an interview and it lasted max 3 hours, this time around though I was waiting and waiting at Starbucks for 5 hours. At a point I got tired of waiting and I drove to the school since I was so excited to hear how he did. He walked outside maybe 5 minutes later with the biggest smile on his face! The interview went so well and he was told that he’d see an answer from them anywhere between two to five weeks. Sure enough, exactly two weeks later, when we both went out to grab a few things at target, we checked the mail and there it was… The letter we’ve been waiting for, telling us if he’ll be in school next August or if we’ll be in limbo another year.
Before he even opened the letter I knew what it was going to say and when he did open it there was so much joy and relief across his face. He got into PCOM for the class of 2020 starting in August and I cannot be more proud of him. We made our phone calls to our family members and my mother was on the other end of the phone crying with so much joy for us. We finally will know where we’re living for the next four years, we finally are moving along.
