August 26, 2020
Dear Middlebury College Pre-Health Student:
Happy Fall!!
Whether you are taking classes on campus, learning from afar, or pushing pause on your studies, six months into the COVID-19 pandemic we wanted to take a moment to reconnect.
Fundamental to the advisor-advisee relationship is a foundation of trust. Students trust us to be knowledgeable, they trust us to be well informed and they trust us to be effective advocates. They trust us to provide an honest assessment of their potential, and a roadmap for how to attain their goals. In unprecedented times such as these, they must also trust us to share information in a responsible fashion, and deliver inconvenient truths, and so we begin with an inconvenient truth:
There is nothing easy about being a pre-health student in the time of COVID, and while we anticipate some leniency around clinical shadowing hours, research time and in-person volunteering, medical schools will not be flexible when it comes to academic preparedness.
To help us navigate these uncharted waters and determine how to ensure preparedness, the NECOME undergraduate advisors have been meeting regularly since March. We’ve also had the opportunity to meet with NECOME medical school admissions teams, and we offer some general thoughts on how the pandemic might impact your path to preparedness.
•Your timeline to medical school might be longer than you originally planned.
•You might be advised to take additional upper level science classes if your foundational coursework was largely remote.
•Obtaining strong letters of recommendation will be more challenging, and it will take more effort to build robust relationships with professors.
•Your MCAT prep will likely require more time, and you will need to fill in content gaps.
•Obtaining a lab job between college and medical school might be problematic if you do not have evidence of laboratory skills.
From the abrupt termination of the spring semester, to remote classwork, P/F grades, truncated labs, lost internships, rescinded clinical shadowing and volunteer opportunities, a paucity of jobs and cancelled MCATS, upheaval and uncertainty are the norm. And while we have all been impacted by the pandemic, some in our communities have experienced challenges and disruptions on a scale that we cannot even begin to appreciate. Many of our students report feeling stressed, scared and deeply unsettled, and we encourage you to reach out and connect with your advisor and avail yourselves of Middlebury College’s mental health resources. Please keep an eye on our website for a host of useful information and notification of meetings and virtual events.
Additionally, as students who are pursuing careers in a health profession, we expect you to be leaders in promoting good health within the Middlebury community. This means adhering strictly to the requirements you agreed to in the Middlebury College health pledge. COVID-19 is bigger than any one of us, and abiding by the pledge means that you are doing your part to keep your fellow students, professors, essential workers, and the greater Middlebury community safe. Professional schools will not be forgiving of pledge violations. Embrace the opportunity to serve as a role model of compliance and safety.
If there is a glimmer of hope to be had it’s this: your liberal arts education will prepare you spectacularly well for this moment in time, a time long overdue to address health care disparities and the social determinants of health. We need strong communicators, effective advocates, and critical thinkers. You are the empathetic, smart, resourceful and kind people to whom we will turn to fix this mess. We need creative minds and generous spirits. We need your intelligence and energy and will. We need you.
Mary Lothrop and Hannah Benz