This past Saturday, I worked as a tour guide/panelist for the school's Osteopathic Medicine Awareness Conference, where they invite ungrad students and their families to come to the school for a day and get more information on the programs offered (basically, they spend the day wooing and recruiting.) Anyway, I had a group of about 15 students and some parents that I spent about 2 hours talking to as I showed them the grounds. The questions ranged from "what kind of MCAT scores to you need to apply?" to "how much do parking permits cost?" I had a lot of fun talking with everyone (my personal selling point is our Essentials of Clinical Medicine" class where we learn to take histories and do physicals on the school's "Standardized Test Patients" - people who are trained to be patients!) After the tours, I talked to a few students before the pannel discussion, and gave them my email address to contact me if they had any more questions. Needless to say, here are a few tidbits from my inbox:

Hello Cara!! My name is Melissa and I met you at the conference. Thanks for all the insightful information about Western U. Your input and the whole conference gave me a much better picture of how to become a doctor. Do you know of who I can get in contact with to find out more information about pharmacy? Thanks again and I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.

While that one made me happy (since I have the pathological need to help people - pfft!) I recieved one that was even better:

My name is Derek B., I'm a junior at the University of La Verne. I attended the Western University Orientation on Saturday November 12, 2005. I had spoken to you about contacting you through email, during the student tour, because I had a few questions, which I thank you very much. I know you are very busy and I was wondering whenever you have a chance, if you could answer my questions. A couple of my questions are about admissions to this school. Western University is my number one choice medical school and Saturday's orientation and yourself made it more number 1 and I thank you again. My first question is if you had any tips about what I should be doing right now in terms of volunteer work that would help me, in the admissions process, to stand out? My second important question is that I don't have a high GPA and I was wondering if you think I still had a chance to get in to Western U and if so is there any advice that you could give me? I'm very worried about not getting in, because this is my dream. Thank you for your time and I hope everything is going well for you.

Isn't that so cool? That makes me all happy and stuff! (needless to say, I went ahead and volunteered work again for the next conference in the Spring!)