One Step Before, Northwestern’s minority pre-medical association, hosted the 5th annual Medical School Day at Norris Saturday. Its aim was to bring the process and experience of med school to students.
This year, instead of having traditional boards and panels, OSB diversified its activities to show the different, nontraditional roads to medical school. Participants had a choice of partaking in suture labs, attending talks hosted by NU students accepted into medical school, lunching with medical school representatives, attending stress relief panels, going to a pre-med/pre-health information sessions, and attending a post baccalaureate information session.
“There’s not one path to medical school,” Weinberg junior and OSB president Jean Mbachu said. “That’s why medical school day is different this year, complete with workshops – each pertinent to every step of the application process.”
Furthermore, Mbachu said OSB wanted to offer more resources to students. A stress relief workshop aimed at helping with the medical school application process, and the suture lab gave students a taste of medical school requirements.
About 80 people attended, but these people were not limited to just Northwestern and Chicago-area students. Parents, post-baccalaureates and high school teachers were also present.
Weinberg freshmen Allan Zheng said “being able to ask people who are directly influential in the process is a positive experience.”
Communications sophomore Nicha Garg agreed.
“It’s really running smoothly and I’m getting valuable information,” Garg said. “They should do this every year. So far, my favorite has been the suturing.”
Medical School Day speaker and Weinberg senior Vanessa Rivas-Lopez summed up the day.
“The most important thing to get out of this is to make sure you know why you want to be a doctor,” Rivas-Lopez said. “You have to be passionate about it and be comfortable talking about it.”