Admissions Straight Talk

Zack Timmons integrated business and medicine to take on a social problem facing his community. [Show summary]

Zack Timmons, a fourth-year medical student at Dell Medical School at UT Austin, combined his passion for medicine with his background in business to create Good Apple, an Austin-based produce delivery company on a mission to end food insecurity. Listen to the conversation >>

A med student and social entrepreneur on a mission to alleviate food insecurity in his area [Show notes]

Zack Timmons is a fourth-year medical student at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin and co-founder and CEO at Good Apple, an Austin-based produce delivery company on a mission to end food insecurity. Since launching Good Apple in November 2019 as a third-year medical student, Zack and his team have delivered over 540,000 pounds of healthy food directly to the doors of over 17,000 people facing food insecurity.

Prior to medical school, Zack attended Rice University where he studied the cognitive sciences and was premed. He later worked for two years as a business analyst at Deloitte Consulting. He plans to pursue an emergency medicine residency, where he hopes to leverage his patient stories in the emergency room to continue building programs and organizations to meet the health needs of our community's most vulnerable residents. 

Can you tell us a bit about your background outside of medicine? [2:14]

I grew up near Waco, Texas in a small town just outside of Waco called Robinson, Texas, and lived there with my younger sister and my two parents who are a huge influence on my life. My dad is a commercial tire salesman and my mom's a social worker. I think they've really instilled the importance of getting to know people and service in the community. They're a huge influence on me. 

I always really enjoyed the outdoors. I think that's something I still enjoy today, from downhill skiing to long-distance backpacking. Most recently, my partner and I completed about 300 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail in California. Cooking is also a huge hobby. I spent a little bit of time in the Northeast prior to medical school and got to know Marc Vetri, who is an incredible pasta chef in Philadelphia. So have recently been making a lot of homemade pasta, which is great.

When did you decide to become a doctor? [3:38]

Probably when I was a senior in high school, I made the decision that I was at least interested in medicine. I will say one thing is that my passions for medicine have definitely changed and matured the more I get into the field. I think there are so many reasons to be excited about healthcare today. But I think initially, the way I started off was maybe a pretty simple story. I was really interested in the sciences and loved the application in helping people. That was kind of the initial impetus to my path. When I got to Rice University where I went to undergrad, as you mentioned, I had this incredible opportunity to work as an emergency medicine technician, and I actually gained my advanced certification through a course at Rice, which is really cool. So I did that for three years during undergrad.

Why Georgetown's new MSBA program may be just what you're looking for! [Show Summary]

Dr. Sudipta Dasmohapatra, Academic Director of Georgetown’s MSBA program, goes in-depth on who the new online master’s program is for and how will prepare students for careers in data science leadership.

Earn your Master's of Science in business analytics online in just 16 months, while continuing to work. [Show Notes]

Are you attracted to business analytics but don't want to take the time off work to enter a full-time program to master the topic? Georgetown's McDonough School of Business has just what you're looking for: an online master's designed for working professionals. Today's guest is the director of that program, and we're going to learn all about it.

Dr. Sudipta Dasmohapatra earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in India and her PhD from Penn State, and she's always been a numbers geek. She started her career as a data scientist in 2004 and her teaching career at North Carolina State, where she was Associate Professor of Marketing and Customer Analytics until 2017. In 2017, she became, among other duties, the Director of the Master's in Statistical Science at Duke University, and in 2020 she joined Georgetown as Academic Director of its brand new online MS in Business Analytics (MSBA) program for working professionals.

Can you provide an overview of Georgetown's MSBA program? [2:06]

The Georgetown Master’s in Business Analytics offered by the McDonough School of Business is coming online in January 2021. It is an online, 16-month, comprehensive analytics program. We have designed it with the goal of preparing future business leaders and managers that are interested in learning how to understand data and how to use data to create, share, and sustain value.

The graduates of this program will be prepared to lead in key growth sectors where graduates that have deep business analytic skills are highly sought. This particular program has been rigorously curated to meet the needs of the current marketplace. We have integrated the technical aspects of data analytics with the managerial business functions so that the students can learn to speak and communicate the language of data.

Within this particular program, we have both asynchronous classes, as well as synchronous sessions in which the students can join their cohort, as well as a prominent faculty, in a virtual classroom. Students also have the opportunity to come to campus. We have two week-long campus-based residencies that provide integrated hands-on activities to the students through a very intensive, week-long curriculum.

One of the cornerstones of this particular program that I want to talk about is the capstone project. The capstone project, over six months, applies the program's concepts and methods and tools that the students learn in a challenging business data analytics assignment with a project sponsor. Students that come into this program can not only leverage the core McDonough and Georgetown community network, but being in the global capital city of Washington DC, we are going to connect the students to a network of people, programs, and complex data that have real-world consequen...

What's it like being a student at Stanford GSB? [Show summary]

Ilana Walder-Biesanz’s eclectic background includes engineering, opera, product management, ballroom dance, data analytics, and theatre. In this episode, she shares why she also pursued an MBA from Stanford GSB.

Should you include interests and experiences that are not directly business-related in your MBA application? Absolutely! [Show notes]

This show's guest is a true Renaissance woman, currently interning for a company in Nigeria, after earning her MBA from Stanford GSB as a member of the Class of 2020. She also has a fascinating series of experiences before arriving at Stanford.

Ilana Walder-Biesanz earned her bachelor's in engineering from the Olin College of Engineering in 2013. As a student at Olin, she also had an arts and humanities concentration in theater and founded the Olin Opera Organization. After graduating, she pursued her masters at the University of Cambridge in European Literature and Culture and was a Gates Cambridge Scholar. She then studied for a year at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich as a Fulbright Scholar. Returning to the U.S., she worked for three years for Yahoo as a Product Manager and joined Stanford's GSB class of 2020, where she was a Siebel Scholar and an RJ Miller Scholar. She just became a data analyst marketing intern, working remotely for a Nigerian-based company on behalf of Stanford Seed, the Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies. And what I've told you is just the tip of the iceberg. Ilana has traveled extensively. Per her LinkedIn profile, she speaks English, Spanish, German, and Italian reasonably well, and some Japanese, French, and Hebrew. I'm not exaggerating when I say she is a true Renaissance woman.

Can you tell us a little bit about your background? [2:26]

I grew up in Portland, Oregon to two parents who had both studied theater in college and had started their careers as actors. So they pretty much pushed me onto the stage as soon as I could walk and talk. I think that's been a through-line of things I'm interested in throughout my life in engineering and business: I've been an avid actress and theater-goer. Dance came a little bit later. I was horribly graceless as a child, and my mother (who was actually also a dance teacher on the side) despaired of me and pulled me out of dance classes because I was so bad at it. But at some point later in life, I found my feet and really developed a passion for ballroom dancing.

Can you go into a little more depth on how you developed your interest in engineering and analytics, along with your interest in opera, dance, and the humanities? [3:27]

The humanities and opera and dance definitely came first. I actually discovered engineering through Girl Scouts probably when I was eight or nine. My Girl Scout troop went to a Lego Robotics sampler. Just a day where we all built robots out of Legos together. I thought it was the coolest thing. I signed up for Lego Robotics after school and eventually graduated to building robots out of metal instead of Legos. I did that throughout middle school and high school and that was what sparked the interest in engineering and in building robots,

Could a postbac program boost your chances of acceptance to medical school?[Show summary]

Dr. Barry Rothman, an Accepted consultant with 19 years of experience in health professions advising, shares his expert guidance for applicants considering postbac programs and medical school.

Learn how this admissions cycle will differ from other cycles, and how you can best position yourself for success. [Show notes]

Dr. Barry Rothman is a former health professions advisor and Director of San Francisco State University's pre-health professions certificate program, which served pre-med, pre-dental, pre-nursing, and other pre-healthcare students who were preparing themselves to apply to their graduate professional schools. Today, he helps Accepted's clients in all aspects of the application process to graduate healthcare programs and graduate schools in the life sciences. 

How did you get involved in pre-health advising at San Francisco State University? [2:22]

I was being a good tenure-track faculty member, and I was given the opportunity to be the health professions advisor because the previous one had retired. I had no idea what I was getting into. I thought, "Oh sure, it'll be an interesting sideline." Little did I know that I would fall in love with it. Within a few years, I would be working with many health profession students and pre-health profession students, and that they would want more service than our school was offering, especially the ones that were postbac. With their support and help and with the support and help of my dean, we created, from nothing, a postbac program that's been highly successful the last 14 years. 

Most of the applicants were premeds. Then when it was successful, I realized that it could expand into other areas. We expanded into a dental postbac program, in collaboration with UC San Francisco's School of Dentistry. We expanded into a nursing postbac program, which was also very successful and very unusual. There are very few nursing, dedicated postbac programs.

In your opinion, who should consider a postbac program? [3:52]

There are two major types of postbacs. One is called a career changer. Some people really don't figure out what they want to do, career-wise, until partway through, or maybe even all the way through undergraduate school. There's a certain kind for career changers that will take them through all the medical school prerequisites and hopefully a few upper-division electives. They basically need all the coursework, or almost all the courses, that medical schools require. There's another kind of career changer, which is somebody who actually completed their undergraduate degree, went out into the workforce, and then got the epiphany that they wanted to go into a health profession. Interestingly, many of them are children of physicians. If you're a child of a physician or a healthcare provider, you want to make sure you're making this choice on your own, not because mom or dad is in healthcare. Sometimes,

How to write an acceptance-worthy essay for HBS [Show summary]

Harsha Mulchandani, member of the Harvard Business School Class of 2021, offers her perspective on student life at HBS, as well as what her work on the Harbus Essay Guide has taught her about writing the perfect admissions essay.

How can The Harbus Essay Guide help you craft your admissions essays? [Show notes]

Is HBS on your list? Hear from this student about her experience so far at Harvard Business School (shut down and all) and about how the Harbus Essay Guide can help you get accepted.

Our guest today, Harsha Mulchandani, lived most of her life in India. She earned an integrated MS in mathematics and computer science in 2015 from IIT Kanpur. She then launched her professional career at Boston Consulting Group and left BCG to become an investment analyst in 2017. She moved to Boston to attend Harvard Business School last summer and join the class of 2021.

For her summer internship, she is an M&A and operations associate while also serving, separately, as a product manager for Harbus, HBS' student newspaper. For Harbus, she works primarily on the Harbus Essay Guide, which just came out, and its interview guide, which will come out shortly.

Can you tell us a little bit about your background, where you grew up, and what you like to do for fun? [2:05]

I grew up in India. For the largest part of my life, I was in a town in the northern part of India called Jaipur. You may have heard of it as the “Pink City” or a city famous for forts and palaces, or more recently for weddings. It's getting popular. I spent a large part of my time, until I was 18, there. And then I shifted to Kanpur to do my integrated master's in mathematics and scientific computing. I spent about five years there. After that, as you mentioned, I launched into management consulting with the Boston Consulting Group. A large part of my two and a half years there was focused on consumer goods, and I did a project with the government of Rajasthan, which is my home state as well. And then from there, I went on to a private equity fund called Westbridge Capital. I spent about a year and a half there, and I'm here now. That's what I did before joining HBS, other than of course getting married.

And for fun, I've been into dance all my life. I used to do a lot of dance growing up, in college and now in HBS. And I like to go for short runs and listen to some of my favorite podcasts.

Why did you decide to get an MBA? [3:46]

I guess this is the question that people ask any MBA graduate often, or someone who is deciding to go into an MBA. I guess the most important question to answer is, why an MBA? And I guess for me, the answer was never just about only the hard skills or only the more tangible skills. It was a mix of a hard skills agenda and a more personal development agenda. And the answer for me somehow has always been a cross cut of those two. My exposure to working styles had only been focused on my own geography, which is India,

A Columbia Med School student's incredible response to COVID-19 [Show summary]

Dr. David Edelman, a recent graduate of Columbia Medical School, shares his perspective on pursuing a career in medicine during these exceptional times, as well as what led him to co-found the COVID-19 Student Service Corps.

The journey of a Columbia MD/MPH who is already acting on his commitment to health equity [Show notes]

What's it like to attend Columbia Medical? Why did this newly minted doc also earn an MPH, and how did he co-found a student organization to help med students serve New York City during the pandemic? That's what we're going to find out.

Our guest today is Dr. David Edelman, co-founder and past co-chair of the COVID-19 Student Service Corps. Dr. Edelman earned his bachelor's degree in biology and Spanish from Washington University in St. Louis in 2015. He then began his medical school studies at Columbia University's Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. While there, he also earned an MPH at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health. He is about to start his residency at Montefiore Medical Center in its Primary Care and Social Internal Medicine program.

Can you tell us about your background outside of medicine? [2:20]

I'm originally from a small suburb outside of Cleveland, Ohio. I grew up there, played a lot of sports growing up, and then left the nest to be an undergraduate in St. Louis at Washington University. I continued on with sports for a little bit there. I played football for a year, was on the club baseball team for a while, and then really found interests in Spanish language, which I studied abroad a little bit in Spain. I just loved being in a different place and being on my own and learning about language and culture and people, as well as global health and the intersections between health and equity in the United States and abroad.

I've gotten into running over the last five years. I love hiking. I have a dog who is here with me. Since I haven't started residency, I'm able to spend a lot of time with my dog. I also host a weekly trivia question for friends and family as a way to stay in touch over the last few years, which has been really fun. Those are my little quirky things I like to do.

When did you decide to become a doctor? [3:40]

I think the first moment was in high school. I think it really speaks to how the teachers that you have really make a difference on what you do in life. I was in a biology class and the teacher I had in 10th grade, Mr. Grim, was just such a phenomenal inspiring person. It's a cliche, but he made all the science come alive. And it's not because we were dissecting animals or anything, but because he really connected everything that we were learning in such a fun, fundamental way to how we live and breathe and act as people. That got me interested in it.

The only physician in my family is my uncle. When I was telling him about how much I loved it, that class in 10th grade, he said, "Why don't you come down to my hospital one night, and you can shadow in the emergency room?" That first ever experience in medicine was on a Friday night, downtown Cleveland,

What's it like to be a student at a top business school during COVID-19? [Show summary]

Eli Engelman, member of the Columbia Business School Class of 2021, shares his experience applying to and matriculating at Columbia’s MBA program, including how his experience has been shaped by COVID-19.

A CBS student reflects on his b-school experience so far [Show notes]

Are you wondering if an MBA moved online is a valuable experience? Or are you less worried about how your education will be delivered and more worried about getting into an elite MBA program when you didn't necessarily attend a college with an Ivy League pedigree? Our guest today will address both those topics.

Eli Engelman grew up outside of New York city and decided after a stint in the Israeli army to attend the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College, where he earned a BA in finance and minored in philosophy and computer applications and business. After interning at Bank Leumi, he joined the bank full time in 2016 and worked there until he joined Columbia Business School's Class of 2021.

Can you tell us a little bit about your background and where you grew up? What do you like to do for fun? [1:52]

I grew up in Monsey, New York, which is about 45 minutes north of the city. I attended a local high school and upon graduating, I decided that I wanted a little bit of an interesting experience in life. And so I moved to Israel to study abroad and join the Israeli Defense Force. And after three years in Israel, I decided to return to New York, this time Manhattan. I wanted to position myself at the center of business and to pursue a degree at Baruch College. Like you said, I majored in finance and minored in computer information systems and philosophy. And I had a wonderful internship at Bank Leumi, which is Israel's largest investments bank, and I decided to join them full-time. I loved the idea of being at the intersection of business, as well as that international experience that being at an Israeli bank afforded me. And at Leumi, I was a member of both the portfolio strategy and alternative investment teams. For fun, I love to read, I love to snowboard, hike and travel, and discovering different cuisines is a favorite pastime of mine.

Your undergraduate degree is in business. You have four and a half solid years of experience at an international bank. Why did you decide you wanted or needed an MBA? [3:11]

There are three primary reasons. I think there are actually many more, but the three that spring to mind are the fact that at Leumi, I got a really broad experience and I thought it was very important that starting out, I would focus more on the breadth than the depth of my experience, just to see what I would like. And I worked on public markets and private markets, and the private markets were really interesting to me. I hoped an MBA would allow me to leverage what I learned at Leumi and provide me a platform to focus my skill on that particular discipline.

The second was that I wanted to just surround myself with ambitious, hardworking peers who I could learn so much from,

What unique challenges can this year's med school applicants expect to face, and how can they be overcome? [Show summary]

Dr. Herman “Flash” Gordon, Accepted medical admissions consultant, walks med school applicants through applying during COVID-19, as well as disclosing thorny issues like academic discipline or a criminal record.

How COVID-19 is impacting medical school admissions [Show notes]

Dr. Gordon returns to Admissions Straight Talk to discuss applying during the pandemic, as well as applying with blemishes, like a criminal record or academic discipline. What qualifies him to guide you? He served as chair of a medical school admissions committee for four years.

Dr. Gordon earned his bachelor's at Harvard and his PhD in developmental neuroscience from Caltech. He began teaching at the University of Arizona's medical school in Tucson in 1991 and has been doing so ever since. He also served as chair of the med school's admissions committee, and after leaving that position in 2014, he's been a very popular admissions consultant at Accepted. Who can better guide you in applying to med school, especially if you have some issues to deal with? (And everyone is dealing with the issue called COVID-19.)

How did you get involved in med school admissions at the University of Arizona? [2:14]

Like so many committee assignments, I was drafted. I was fine with it because I thought it was an opportunity to help choose the students that I'd be teaching. As I got into it, I really, really enjoyed it. It's such an important committee in med schools. It's definitely the most labor intensive, even probably more than PMT. It's also extremely rewarding, because you're changing people's lives by accepting them to med school, and it's such an intense effort. You're working with your colleagues who are also really dedicated to this task, and the outcome is great. You end up with this class that you really enjoy teaching, and you feel good about them becoming doctors.

At University of Arizona, like at many schools, there are a number of students who serve on a committee as well. And that's very valuable, and I think they get the word out to fellow students, both at their own school and other schools, how dedicated everybody is to this effort. They also communicate how much effort it is, but it's also something I think everybody feels good about. I know that from talking with colleagues, who say "I had to serve on this or that committee," the one committee that everybody says was really worthwhile was the admissions committee.

There's uncertainty about the kind of education future med students will get this fall. (Online? Offline? Blended? Clinical experience?) What's your take on how they should be responding to these different challenges? Let's take, first of all, the uncertainty surrounding the MCAT.

Are you dreaming of an MBA from UCLA Anderson? [Show summary]

UCLA Anderson’s Assistant Dean of MBA Admissions, Alex Lawrence, explores the opportunities awaiting future MBA students, as well as the changes Anderson is making to campus life this fall to provide its students with a safe, rewarding MBA experience.

Learn about Anderson's unique MBA program, as well as tips for submitting an acceptance-worthy Anderson application [Show notes]

Alex Lawrence is the Assistant Dean of MBA Admissions and Financial Aid at UCLA School of Management and an Anderson alum who earned his MBA in 1999. Prior to that, he earned bachelors and masters degrees in electrical engineering. After earning his MBA, he worked in management consulting for four years and then returned to UCLA Anderson as director of the Riordan Programs before becoming Assistant Dean for MBA Admissions.

Can you give an overview of the Anderson full-time MBA program, focusing on its more distinctive elements? [2:08]

Anderson emphasizes early specialization and hands-on experiences. We're like the typical two-year MBA program, having core classes with electives following that. I think one of the distinctive features, especially since we were the first school to have this as part of the requirement, is that all of our students have to complete one of two hands-on exercises or opportunities, that being the applied management research project, where you get a chance to work with an organization on a real business challenge or a business creation option. We were the first ones to create that opportunity for our MBA students.

In addition, we're not a one-trick pony in the sense that we're not just a consulting school or a finance school. There's a lot of different areas that our students can be interested in or focus on. That variety makes our campus, our culture, so much more distinctive than other campuses, because students come in with diverse backgrounds and diverse interests.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNyw9J9NHFU

Other than the lockdown and pandemic, what's new at UCLA Anderson? [3:37]

One of the big things is that we launched a brand-new campus, a brand-new facility building, which is spectacular. Before this virus situation went down, the students were really enjoying it, the visitors who were coming, prospects, as well as those who had just been admitted and are still coming, the class of 2022 and beyond. Fantastic facility. Our new dean at that time, Tony Bernardo, he's still short of a year of being in the program, though he's been here on the campus for over 20 years, so we had a new dean in place as well. Those are two of the biggest things.

What don't people know about Anderson that you would like them to know, on a bigger scale? [5:03]

I alluded to it a little bit earlier, talking about the variety of choices that students can look at. Very few people know that in the Los Angeles area alone,

Can students make a difference during the current pandemic? [Show summary]

Jalen Benson, founder of the National Student Response Network and first-year med student at Harvard, discusses what health care volunteer opportunities are out there and how to find them during the Coronavirus outbreak. Listen in.

Finding volunteer opportunities for premeds despite COVID-19 [Show notes]

Here's a common scenario we're hearing about from premeds and others in healthcare fields. It goes like this: “I had a great volunteer community service gig lined up for the spring and summer, but it was canceled due to COVID. What can I do to get this kind of experience and apply effectively?”

Our guest today is Jalen Benson, founder of the National Student Response Network. Jalen is a first-year student at Harvard Medical, after completing his undergrad in biology at Dartmouth and spending two years as a research assistant at Stanford University. When COVID-19 hit and students went home early, he founded the NSRP, a national network of medical, nursing, and PA students in all fifty states that helps connect volunteers with the organizations that need them and might not know they’re there. While many traditional internships and volunteer opportunities are shelved, there are still many ways you can help. The trick is to know where to ask, and realize that even if you can’t go on a far-flung internship, there are many local organizations that need help right now.

Can you tell us a little bit about your background outside of medicine? [1:55]

I'm from the town of Pensacola, Florida. It's in the panhandle of Florida between Tallahassee and New Orleans, so way, way at the far western end. Nice and warm, nice sunny beaches. So growing up in Pensacola, I really could never be still. I loved playing soccer, and I was always doing that and running around doing a million and one things from history, to working at the beach. And my family was mostly me, my younger brother, and my mom.

And going to college I got involved more in the outdoors, and now I love hiking, and skiing, and the whole nine yards. All the things you get into going to New Hampshire when you see snow for the first time. My parents didn't go to college, so there was no warning of what to do or how to do this, it was, "All right, it sounds great." I visited, it looked good to me. I didn't think about what snow was, I hadn't seen it before, but I adjusted and I learned to love it, and I learned to play ice hockey, and ski, and go hiking. My parents still don't know quite how that happened, but here we are.

When did you decide to become a doctor? [3:21]

It's funny, I spent most of my life trying to avoid medicine. My mom is an MRI tech, and she raised us primarily by herself, so that meant a lot of weekends when she was on call, we were on call. Going to the hospital and sitting in waiting rooms, and I was like ... I didn't want to do this. I thought I was going to go and do law. And then as I got older, I fell more in love with science. And what struck me about medicine was the idea of the trust the patient gives you and the story.