Discussing Domestic Violence in Applications

[somethingsomething]

This is my first year applying to med schools and I'm applying all across the country. My grades and EC's are competitive except for my 2nd year, where I didn't have a full course load (one short). I'm still competitive with that year but I want to be eligible for the weighting formulae that other schools have. I have individuals who can support the fact that my home was increasingly domestically violent that year because of personal circumstances, but I don't know where to provide this information.

 

I know UofT has space for it on OMSAS, but I'm not sure how I go about all of the others. Would I be contacting each school personally with supplementary information? I was worried that if so, they may not read it.

 

Queens doesn't even have an essay component so it's not as though I can just incorporate that into my answers. For some schools, there's no place to "fit that information in".

 

I would really appreciate any help. Thank you.

[ellorie]

It's not going to matter for every school - there are a lot of schools that don't require a full course load every year, so as long as you have other years that are fine, or will get your degree, or whatever the requirement is, you can safely ignore it. You only need to worry about any schools that require every year to be full time or anywhere with a peculiar weighting formula like U of T.

 

Personally I would just not go there. If your GPA had been affected or there was a huge hole in your transcript, I might advise differently but if it's just one course short in a single year, you need to weigh up the risk/benefit ratio.

 

I had the same situation due to illness and I did consider officially applying for special consideration, but I ended up not doing it because it didn't seem worth dragging all that stuff up again when my GPA and ECs were adequate and the rest of my transcript looked fine. At schools where the review was more "holistic" I mentioned it in the additional information section, but I didn't officially apply for consideration or provide documentation.

 

If you do decide to do it, you would probably need to call the admissions offices where you are applying and ask for information on what to do and what info to supply. Almost all applications have "additional information" sections embedded within them, but you never really know if anyone reads/considers those, so you'd want to find out how you need to submit the information so that it gets considered and if the school will consider it.