Baylor College of Medicine

Editor's Note: This blog was written a couple of weeks ago but due to technical complications was not uploaded in a timely manner.

After waiting around the Columbus airport for forever (9/24), I finally boarded my plane for Houston. The plane made a brief stop at the Chicago-Midway airport, so naturally the seven of us continuing on to Houston made a mad scramble for the good seats (front windows) once we were done being counted. An old lady ended up sitting next to me on the plane, and we started talking during the flight because she kept spilling her food on me. She started telling me all about her granddaughter who was studying at some Texas university, minoring in Religion so she could go be a missionary somewhere. I told her that I was a missionary in Russia for two years without even having minored in Religion. She had all sorts of questions about that, but it seemed that when she found out that I went to school in Utah she stopped being so curious. Oh well.

I got a ride on SuperShuttle to get from Hobby airport to my host’s apartment. There were only two other people on the shuttle with me and, oddly enough, one of them was some lady from Orem going to some ultrasound conference (she worked in a hospital). So it really seems that I can’t escape from Utah Valley regardless of wherever I go. My host people were really nice (a married couple from BYU), and I just ended up watching “The Office” and “Jeopardy” with them the whole evening while I prepped for my interview.

I rode the light rail transit system into the Texas Medical Center (TMC) Friday morning and was completely amazed at how large the center was! It seemed that TMC should stand for Texas Medical City, because it was definitely larger than some cities that I had been in! If I felt like a little flea at Ohio State, I definitely felt like a tiny electron being bounced around in that big city. I walked around and took pictures of the area (something I actually got into trouble for later on by some of the police… they said I looked like a terrorist taking pictures and could get into trouble with homeland security…. Spending a night—or lifetime—in jail would be a great to impress Baylor!). My interview day didn’t start until noon (and I left at 7:45 when the host-husband-person left for his classes), so I sat around a lot. I saw a lot of applicants interviewing at the neighboring UT-Houston medical school. They got those cool backpacks with the drawstrings! And all I got was a name badge. Not fair, but in a just world they will end up paying for it through their tuition.

The monstrosity Texas Medical Center

More of the medical suburb inside Houston

There were about 50 applicants being interview at Baylor that day, so I was definitely in a big group. After stuffing us with pizza and tons of information about the school, we had a three-hour block where we had two 30-minute interviews. My first interview was with a faculty member who must have been from Nepal or India or something (I’m not an expert, unless he would have been Russian). He had lots of questions about my mission in Russia and wanted to know what a typical day was like. At the end I asked him how he balances his career as a physician with his family (and also how he did it in medical school). It seems that he wasn’t the most qualified person to answer that question, because he told me he sacrificed and left his family to go to medical school because he knew he wouldn’t be able to divide up his time properly (though he is married). Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy! You can’t divide up your time properly so you just completely cut them off? He was happy with his choice, but I definitely won’t be following his example in that way. At the end of the interview, he said that he would be excited to have me at Baylor and his comments to the rest of the admissions committee would be towards that end. : )

My second interview was with a medical student on the admissions committee. Towards the end of the interview he asked if there was anything else that I wanted to tell him about myself that wasn’t on my application. I told the thrilling story of when I was biking in the Columbia River gorge and did not know that my brake was dragging on my front wheel for 29 out of the 30 miles that we rode (this is the cliff-notes version). After I finished he said, “Wow! Did you rehearse that? If that was off the cuff then that was pretty impressive. I can definitely tell you have some background with literature.” I thought that was kind of funny because it’s not like I sat down the night before and planned out that story. Yeah, I’ve told it before but it’s not something I always keep in my back pocket in case a dull moment comes my way. As we were walking out of the room he said how much he enjoyed my story (at least I know that it will stick in brain and give him something to remember me by when he reports to the rest of the committee) and would look forward to having me with a colleague. Hopefully both of these interviewers weren’t just saying that to everyone, because it definitely lets me gauge how well they thought the interview went.

We had several tours of the metropolis known as the Texas Medical Center afterwards and we were finally done with our day at around 7:15. I ran over to the McDonald’s on the main floor of the heart hospital (what a great location for a place that fills you with cholesterol the second you step through the door) for dinner before getting picked up by my student host. It was here that I realized that my name in Texas is not "Bri-an" but rather "Brahn." The cashier did not recognize my name when I said it. After I repeated it, he asked "Brahn?" "Uh... yeah."

Overall I think that the trip to Baylor went pretty well. I was pretty disappointed with it at first (when I first arrived at TMC) because it seemed pretty impersonal and immense, filled with great and spacious buildings everywhere. However, once I got to the medical college, met the students, and got to know more about Baylor I started to feel much more excited about it. Thus, this is a perfect example of why it is so important to interview at the school and keep your feelings open so you can get a feel if the school is right for you or not.

I woke up at 3:30am Saturday morning to catch my 4:00am shuttle to the airport (the driver asked if I was "Mr. Brahn"...). I had never flown on Frontier airlines before, and it was quite the adventure! Each airplane is painted with a different animal on it and so I felt like I was walking into a zoo onboard. Everything from the flaps to the landing gear was creaky, and so at first I worried that the monkeys had gotten loose and tinkered with everything, but we flew safely. At the end of the flight, our pilot let us know that “Sal the Cougar” (the mascot of our plane, apparently) was grateful that we flew with them that morning. I saw the other Frontier planes when we pulled into Denver to switch planes, and I was scouting out which animal I would want to ride on next. It turns out that I got stuck with Jack the Snowshoe hare. Not as cool as Sal the Cougar. I got into Provo at 9:30am, just in time to get picked up from the airport, beat traffic back home, and get ready for the BYU-CSU game! Thus ended my long road trip, finishing the second interview of my double-header. Baylor will start informing the applicants that they accept starting on 10/16, informing a few every week, working their way down their rankings list. So the sooner I hear back from them, the better!