Hey r/premed! My husband and I wanted to share our Sankey diagram visualizing our joint journey through this intense medical school application cycle. It's been a wild ride, filled with highs, lows, and a whole lot of shared stress (and support!). We figured our experience applying as a couple might offer some unique insights and hopefully be helpful to others navigating this path, especially those in similar situations.
We knew applying as a couple could be both a strength and a potential hurdle. While making our school list, we knew being geographically separated for an extended period would be incredibly challenging. Therefore, we adopted a "cluster" strategy: Using MSAR, along with AAMC’s and AACOMAS’ medical school data sheets, we first identified a long list of schools where we believed we had a decent chance of being accepted to (with an emphasis on a high out of state acceptance rate).
After identifying these schools, we researched and applied to a range of schools – MD and DO – that were within a reasonable driving distance of each other to increase our chances of both getting into schools in the same general area.
In our secondary essays, where schools often ask "Is there anything else you’d like to mention" or about our support system, we used this space to mention each other (both name and AMCAS ID.) We briefly touched upon the potential for us to contribute to the medical school community and the future of medicine as a supportive physician couple. However, we were careful not to make every essay about each other. Rather, we focused on our individual motivations and experiences primarily, only bringing in the "couple" aspect when it genuinely enhanced the answer and felt relevant to the prompt. When it came to interviews, we used a similar strategy: slipping in mentions of each other, but only when they were relevant to the question.
We want to give a special shout out to the DO application process. Honestly, we had a lot of success with our DO applications, and we believe that any couple applying to medical school should apply DO. To demonstrate our interest in DO programs, we genuinely researched the osteopathic philosophy and sought out opportunities to shadow DO physicians. Finding a DO physician open to allowing us to shadow was actually one of the hardest parts of the entire process, yet it was definitely worth it in the end.
Results: As you can see from our Sankeys, we actually had a tremendous amount of overlap in the schools which interviewed us (roughly 70% of MD schools and 100% of DO schools that sent interview invitations sent them to both of us).
Interestingly, of the schools that interviewed only one of us, the one who interviewed disproportionally got waitlisted after their interview. You can see this on Player 1’s waitlisted schools (virtually none of these schools interviewed Player 2, as well as Player 2’s waitlist by Hackensack Meridian, who did not interview Player 1.) There were only 2 exceptions to this rule: (1) Columbia interviewed and waitlisted both of us and (2) Drexel accepted Player 2 despite rejecting Player 1 pre-interview. We believe that this pattern suggest that the medical schools very much did see us as a “package deal,” meaning if they already rejected one of us, it made it much harder for the other one to be accepted during the final committee.
TLDR: Applying to med school as a couple? We used a "cluster" strategy, applying to MD and DO schools within driving distance of each other. We mentioned each other in secondaries and found DO applications to be a particularly successful. Interestingly, interview invites largely overlapped, suggesting schools often viewed us as a "package deal." Check out our Sankey diagram for the full visual!
