Suspended for 2 Years – Can I Still Get Into Med School?

Session 269

This student says that he doesn’t feel confident continuing his journey to med school due to a 2-year suspension. Is there any hope for him to pursue his dream?

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Also, please be sure to check out all our other podcasts on Meded Media as we try to bring you as many resources as you need on this journey.

Listen to this podcast episode with the player above, or keep reading for the highlights and takeaway points.

[00:47] The MCAT Minute

If you’re planning on taking the MCAT this cycle, or whenever you plan on taking it, one of the biggest questions I get is: If I can’t take it during the normal kind of March or April timeframe, is it okay to push it back to June in July?

The answer is yes provided you still work on your application. If you can still submit earlier than taking your MCAT or earlier and then waiting for your score to come back, then you’ll probably be fine.

Most medical schools aren’t digging into applications until mid to late July anyway. And so, getting an MCAT score back around that same time isn’t going to hurt you in the grand scheme of things. Now, it may hurt you if the person who’s writing your letter of recommendation is wanting your MCAT score before they’ll write it.

“Take the MCAT when you will be the most prepared.”Click To Tweet

Ultimately, take the MCAT when you’re best prepared. If that means pushing it back to May June, or potentially even July, then go ahead. Just make sure you’re working on your application as well.

The MCAT Minute is sponsored by Blueprint MCAT. Check out their new live on line course. You also get access to their amazing regular online course material as well as all of their exams.

[03:12] OldPreMeds Question of the Week

“In the spring of 2019, a small group of women wrongfully accused me of misconduct due to a set of political opinions I had voiced in a Critical Thinking class.

Unfortunately, because the college had a bias against men in these situations and a lousy investigation, I was suspended for 2 years without proper due process.

As a premed, this is obviously one of the worst things that can happen to you or anyone in general.

To this day, I still do not feel that I am confident enough to continue my journey to medical school as I also failed 2 classes that semester due to the fact that I was removed from all of my classes.

What advice can be given on how I should continue my journey? I have wanted to become a physician since I was five years old and though I have felt like quitting for the past year, there is still a spark in me that wants to continue. Any constructive advice would be extremely helpful.”

[04:09] Can You Still Go to Medical School?

Anyone who says they were wrongfully accused of something and went through some process with the school and was suspended for two years – to me, that wasn’t wrongfully accused. You just don’t want to admit it. Now, I could be wrong. That stuff happens all the time.

But I’ve seen enough students come forward to me and say they were wrongfully accused of something and were kicked out of school. If you were kicked out of school, you probably weren’t wrongfully accused.

The ultimate question is, can you get back to school? Now, you probably could have got back to school anytime you wanted at a different school. The question is why didn’t you? Did you seek any kind of legal advice to try to fight this if you were wrongfully accused?

But going back to being suspended, yes, you can still get into medical school. You’re going to have to talk about why your education was stopped.

The application services have that question in their application asking about whether you have institutional actions. And the answer is yes so put that in your application. Because if you lead with being wrongfully accused, then your application will end up in the trash.

[05:57] Focus on What You’ve Learned

'Medical schools, and people in general, want to learn or hear that you have learned from whatever has happened in the past.'Click To Tweet

If you lead with being wrongfully accused, then it may show to the admissions committee that you haven’t learned anything. So if you lead with that, if that’s the story that you’re going to stick with, you probably won’t get into medical school.

Because if it were true that you were wrongfully accused, there are still ways to learn from that experience. You may not like writing about what you’ve learned from that experience as it puts you in the center to blame. But there are ways to do that to show that you have grown as a person from this experience.

You’re just going to have to prove that you are academically capable of doing well in medical school. And as the old adage says, “Time heals all wounds.”

And so the fact that you were suspended potentially early on in your academic career is a good thing. That means you can go back to school and do well. Just make sure that nothing else happens and that will end up on your record.

But if this happens as a senior, that could be much harder to overcome. You will likely need a postbac or master’s to put the time in between the institutional action and applying to medical school.

[07:50] Own Up to It!

Time heals all wounds, as long as you as they say repent for your sins. You were kicked out of school for a reason. Schools are always protecting their butt because of lawyers.

There was obviously enough there to warrant suspending you from school. So own up to whatever happened.

Talk about what you learned about it, how you’ve grown from it, do well in school, and you will and can get into medical school. If this is still what you want, then continue down this journey.

One random other thought that just doesn’t make sense to me is failing two classes due to the fact that you were removed from the classes. If you have two F’s on your classes, because you were removed from the classes, those should be W’s.

So contact the school and ask if they could change those to W’s. And explain that you’ve been removed from the class, therefore, you shouldn’t get an F.