The Pre-Med Playbook

You can be the “smart kid” your whole life and still get humbled fast by the first year of medical school. Right after finishing their last exam, three NYIT College of Osteopathic Medicine students sit down with me to unpack what the transition really feels like, from the relief of being “25% doctors” to the stress of never feeling fully ready for a test. We dig into imposter syndrome and the prac...

Med school dreams don’t always follow a straight line, and that doesn’t make them any less real. We sit down with three NYITCOM students who took a post-bacc Master of Biomedical Sciences (BMS) route before starting a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (DO) program, and they get honest about what pushed them there: waitlists, shaky confidence, big life detours, and the stress of the MCAT. If you’ve ev...

The number that freaks people out is easy to say and hard to picture: $300,000. We wanted to slow that down and make it real, so we sat with Dr. Shane Speights, Dean of NYIT College of Osteopathic Medicine at Arkansas State, and Dr. Vicki Walker, our associate director of financial aid and registration, to talk plainly about the true cost of medical school and how students actually pay for it. We...

Most people think choosing a medical specialty is a single decision you make near the end of med school. We see it as a long chain of moments: the first patient you connect with, the rotation that surprises you, the mentor who challenges you, and the day you realize you actually want to come back and do this work for decades. We sit down with Dr. Adam Hurst, an outpatient pediatrician and NYITCOM...

The MCAT can feel like a gatekeeper, and a “perfect” timeline can feel like the only timeline. We sit down with three NYITCOM Arkansas medical students who prove that neither is true. Their stories include a strategic gap year for MCAT prep and clinical hours, a nontraditional route that includes a biomedical sciences master’s program, and five gap years shaped by burnout, patient care work, and t...

The medical school admissions process feels confusing for a reason: it is part academics, part storytelling, and part long-term planning. We sit down with our NYIT College of Osteopathic Medicine team at Arkansas State University, plus a current second-year medical student, to give you a clear map of what matters and what doesn’t as you move from premed to medical student. We talk about the bigges...

Arkansas doesn’t just have a healthcare challenge; it has a pipeline challenge. A third of the physician workforce is 60 or older, and the state ranks near the bottom in doctors per capita and key health outcomes. So, how do you build more doctors who actually train here and stay here? I sit down with Casey Pearce, Director of External Relations and Marketing for NYIT College of Osteopathic Medici...