a humorous amcas essay

8/8/2019 A Humorous AMCAS Essay

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A Humorous AMCAS Essay.

Getting into medical school may seem a life-and-death matter until you are caught in a

Himalayan blizzard with your pants down (a fate decidedly worse than a rejection letter).

Barring the latter eventuality, we think you should lighten up and thus are providing you

with a paradigmatic essay (see below) which despite your best efforts, you won't be able

to match, unless you are Siamese Triplets leading separate lives but endeavouring to get

into medical school on a single application. If you think you don't measure up to the

following, don't despair- relax. We can help you climb the mountain while strategically

planting oxygen bottles along the way.

The Ultimate AMCAS Essay by Daniel Guttman

I felt fortunate to awaken from my weeks-long life-threatening coma in the Zimbabwe

orphanage in which I was raised from infancy, until I realized the building was ablaze.

After evacuating all the inhabitants including any stray insects who were drawn to the

flames, I doused the fire with a water pump I had improvised from an old accordionbellows (on which I often played Bach fugues a la Albert Schweitzer) and a bamboo-like

plant I had discovered in the jungle. I named the plant Medusa Abandon after my now

forgiven American born mother, who forsook me in my cradle, only after it turned out to

be an unknown genus and promised to have exciting anti-cancer medicinal qualities as

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well. When I was convinced that everyone in the orphanage was safe, I escaped theholocaust in the solar powered wheel chair I had developed to give myself more mobility

after the unfortunate accident I had as a child, breaking my seventh vertebra while

wrestling a lion that had terrorized the village.

When I was seven, the only doctor within a 300 mile radius took me under his wing. I

shadowed him for ten years, which was quite difficult when you consider the dense

ungle foliage and lack of sunlight at ground level. The fact that he was a witch doctor

should in no way denigrate his skills nor the efficacy of his spells. If you accept me into

your next medical class, I intend to teach my fellow students a series of hexes that will

eliminate the need for Viagra, Allegra, Grecian Formula and Formula 409.

Most of my adolescence I spent draining swamps, eliminating mosquitoes and generally

reducing the malarial plague in three contiguous countries in equatorial Africa. It was

only after saving the lives of tens of thousands of people that I decided to become a

doctor in hope that over the course of my career I might be able to save just a few

more. The journey to medicine was difficult. It was a choice between being a doctor and

being a shoemaker, but after I taught everyone in my village how to make their own

shoes there was no need to pursue this noble profession.

Harvard was reluctant to let me go after I got straight "A"s as the first graduate in their

new correspondence bachelors degree program but with five majors and 12 books to my


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credit they finally acknowledged (see attached letter) that they had nothing left to teachme. My economics honors thesis was entitled "Grade Inflation at Harvard: The Great

Hoax."

Given my academic prowess, imagine then how mortified I was to receive only a 44

aggregate AMCAS score. Those of you at AMCAS reading this, who may have contributed

to writing the April exam, should be ashamed of yourselves. In the passage on

"Halitosis" you referred to the sufferer as having "bad breadth". The patient could

certainly be circumferentially challenged but I assumed a typo had been committed and

that you meant he had "bad breath" and answered accordingly. My fellow hapless

examinees' incorrect answers to question 39 should be stricken and the exam be

recalibrated accordingly.

In short, becoming a doctor may seem humdrum and a come down compared to my life

so far, but I am willing to unlearn a few things so I won't be so far ahead of my fellow

medical classmates. And don't worry about my disability; I can still perform an

angioplasty and thread several needles while doing 500 one-armed finger pushups.

This essay was written by Daniel Guttman, a long-suffering parent of a medical school

applicant, and is reprinted here with his permission. He is also the proud father and

creator ofCartoonjazz.com which has some of the best medical, educational and other

downright hilarious cartoons this side of the funny papers. They make great gifts for


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graduates, wouldbe graduates andslackersaswell foranyone whoknowsorhaseverheardofthe above. Gotocartoonjazz.comandenjoyorcall732-283-8700 andkvell.

a humorous amcas essay

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