Francesca: This is Francesca from the Smart Growth Rocket Podcast by top class edge.com. More people than ever are making big leaps to their goals, carving their own paths, and being really successful in the process. And on this show, I talked to these bright, shiny successful professionals and entrepreneurs to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they’re taking advantage of so we can all be happier and wealthier.
Emily: Hi everyone. thanks, Francesca so much for having me on the podcast. So my name is Emily. My background is actually in English and creative writing, but I think I have been invited here to mostly talk about my work with my own business, which is called EG Med Prep. And EG. Med Prep is a., Basically a prep company, by company, I mean just me.
I’m the only person behind it and involved in it. My husband doesn’t work with me too, but it’s mostly just me. and basically what I do as part of that company is, I edit applications for the students applying to med school or dental school or other professional schools. And I also do a lot of interview prep, especially around med school interview season.
Basically, I got into this field, through my husband who’s a doctor. I am not a doctor and my background is mostly in English and creative writing. I did a master’s in creative writing at the University of Toronto. I’ve also written several poetry books, but I’m really passionate about like writing and teaching and teaching people how to communicate effectively.
Francesca: I love it and I definitely want to unpack everything that you’ve just said, starting with your, journey, I suppose with English, with literature, with poetry. I think that’s absolutely fascinating. So if you wouldn’t mind telling us what sparked your interest in, let’s say poetry, English literature, and communication?
Emily: Good questions. So when I was, I guess if you had asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, when I was younger, like probably anytime before high school, I would’ve said a veterinarian. I love animals and I was really passionate about that. However, in high school, I cared a lot about my English courses and I.
Liked the science courses, but I felt like I wasn’t very good at them and also I wasn’t as passionate about them. I really liked being able to write essays and read different poems and like that was my favorite part of high school and it took until like the very end of grade 12, I was like on track to become a vet.
I like had taken all these science courses and in grade 12 I just thought like, I can’t imagine myself never taking another English course before. I know I could have taken English in university and done sciences and been and that was possible. but I just was like struggling in all the science courses and like excelling in all the English courses.
And I decided, like kind of at the beginning of grade 12 to just like switch courses. So, I dropped all of my science courses and I just like took English and Writer’s Craft and literature and I applied to university for an English degree. I really liked, my time at university and I also. Got pretty close with some of the professors at U of T who were involved in a creative writing scene.
And I joined a bunch of, like after school, I guess, writing groups and became involved in the Canadian poetry scene. My first book of poems, ‘’ Whistle Stops ‘’, A Locomotive Serial Poem, was published in 2017 by signature editions, and they’re a publisher out in Winnipeg, Manitoba. And since then, I’ve also written a lot of chat books, which are like short books of poems.
My most recent one is, ‘’Never have I ever ‘’. It is, a series of poems that are based on that sleepover game of the same name. So each poem is titled after a different thing that I’ve never done, kind of a play on, right? What, you know, kind of writing what I don’t know. So that has been a lot of fun. And, yeah, I just really enjoy being able to play with words and get across ideas in a way that’s engaging in the way they’re.
Francesca: That’s so cool. And now you’ve got EG med prep. When did this all start? What sparked that idea?
Emily: So, during my undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto, I was with my then boyfriend, now husband, and he was applying for medical school and we actually met in high school and then, you know, continued that through U.T.
We went to U.T together and he, was part of this like interview prep group that met. At, Gerstein Library up in the, like conference rooms there, and basically, him and a bunch of other students would do this kind of like MMI circuit. And I found myself really liking the interview prep aspect of it.
And because it was very much like English, you kind of have to make an argument for why you would be a good med student or why you’d be a good doctor. And, I found that a lot of the skills that I had from my English classes and from writing essays were super transferable to being able to like, make an argument for why your job at McDonald’s actually makes you a fantastic doctor because you have all these leadership skills and managerial skills that transfer really well.
So I would tag along with them to those. Meetings and those like little MMI circuits, that’s multiple mini interviews for people who aren’t in the med sphere. And, I would just offer to give feedback to the students who were practicing, because I liked it and I found it fun. And I had a lot of experience teaching before this.
Like I had taught some high school courses and I’d done a lot of tutoring and most of my teaching was in like essay writing or like English-type things. And I found that. Even though I really liked being able to teach students how to write essays, the stakes are kind of low. Like when you’re writing an essay for an English course, sometimes the breath requirement course where it’s something that like maybe you’re just trying to like get this outta the way so you can get to the things you really care about.
And I care about essays, but I found that a lot of my students were like, okay, I’d rather you just write it for me. But with interviews, first of all, I can’t write an interview for someone else. Like they have to get the skills and become really good. And also the stakes are super, super high. Like you, these are people who are super driven and are really passionate about medicine and they have all these skills and they would make excellent doctors, but sometimes they just need some help articulating how those skills transfer to medicine or, what they actually did in all of these roles. And I found that my English skills led to really well, to, basically helping people do well in interviews. And also I really enjoyed it because the stakes were so high.
Francesca: Very cool. And now you’re doing a Casper course. Is that correct?
Emily: Yeah, so from those initial like sessions in Gerstein Library, I took on some like students privately after my husband got into med school, and that was a long time ago. And basically, since then I’ve been doing it on my own. And basically helping students prepare for interviews and grade applications. Yeah, it’s something that I really enjoy doing and I feel like whatever my students succeed and get in, I feel like if I’m getting into med school over and over again, it’s a lot of fun and.
Yeah, so now I’m running a Casper course. Casper is a tool that’s used in applications that evaluate students or applicants on non-academic skills. Things like empathy and ethics and, moral stance, stuff like that. And it’s a super fast test, so you have to like, write in five minutes, three different questions and like fully explore a scenario.
And it’s something that I find. I am pretty good at because I have a lot of experience with interviews. All of this, the skills that I’ve built in helping people with interviews works really well for Casper, and I have helped students with Casper in the past learning how to prepare for that test. Even though they say you can’t really prepare for it, I think you can’t prepare for it and. Basically now, I’m running a course to disseminate that information on a math scale so that anyone who wants to learn how to do all the Casper, can come to take the course and learn how to answer an ethics question, how to answer their personal question, how to do that really quickly, and then also get some personalized feedback.
Francesca: It sounds like you would be a perfect candidate maybe to get into medical school. You have all the know-how, I mean, just a couple of science courses. Take the MCAT. Would you ever consider going to medical school you so?
Emily: A lot of students have told me that before, like when we’re doing interview prep, I will sometimes like say an answer as if I’m them and they’ll be like, oh my God, that’s fantastic. You should go to med school instead of me. I get that all the time. Absolutely not. I would not like to be a doctor. I would hate it. It’s way too like emotionally draining for me to be that close to people who are sick and suffering, don’t like it. I much rather prefer like helping people succeed where everything is like happy and like worst case scenario, you don’t get any try again next year.
The stakes of medicine. I said I like high stakes. I like high stakes to an extent when it’s life and death, it’s a little too high stakes for me. I also like, don’t love blood.
Francesca: Maybe not for you.
Emily: I would say yeah, not for me.
Francesca: So, no, no. Grey’s Anatomy in your future in terms of your lifestyle anyway,.
Emily: Yeah, I’m, I’ve, I’m surrounded by doctors all the time. I’m married to a doctor. there’s doctors all around me. I’ve, I’ve had enough doctors. I don’t need to be one.
Francesca: It’s interesting, just thinking back to, I guess, when you mentioned you wanted to be a vet back in the day, I wanted to be a vet, you know, back in, I would say elementary school. One thing that really stopped me, and I don’t know if it affected you at all or if this factored into your decision at all, but one thing that stopped me was I couldn’t take the idea of being around sick puppies or sick kittens or cats all day. I, that just broke my heart. And that’s what I, I mean, I’m very scientifically in terms of, science, I’m very strong. But the idea of being around sick animals all day just, oh, it broke me. It broke me. So yeah, there’s, there are definitely some things that, maybe are not for us.
Emily: Yeah.
Francesca: But thinking to the next steps, so your Casper cores, what else is in, in this, the future for Emily?
Emily: Yeah, so I’m excited to start this new 2022, 23 med application cycle. It’s like just ramping up now. So applications are due beginning of October, so editing. My editing season is kind of like now until the end of September, and then I have a little bit of a break and then interviews start again around like January, December, really picking up around February, March. So it’s a super seasonal, business to be in, which is kind of nice. On the personal side, I had a baby two months ago.
Francesca: Oh! wow!. Congratulations.
Emily: Thank you. So he’s been keeping me really busy and yeah, that’s been fun, like learning how to be a mom for the first time and just like having the best time ever chilling at home. My husband’s on parental leave, which is great, so he gets to take a break from being a doctor. Just hang out with us, which is nice.
Francesca: That’s insane. What would you say are three, if you could maybe come up with them three top questions or most commonly asked questions that you get from applicants that you work with?
Emily: Good question. Okay. So I would say one question I get all the time is, how can I stand out? or how can I make my experiences different from everyone else’s? Because everyone has volunteered in a hospital or everyone’s been a leader of a club. I don’t think my experiences are that unique. You actually don’t have to have like, the most interesting activities on your resume. Of course, like if you’re a race car driver or if you’re like a pilot, that’s gonna stand out in and of itself.
But even if you have volunteered at a hospital, which I’m sure like 80% of the people applying to med school have done at some point, and that is on their resume. The way to make your experiences stand out is to be super, super detailed in your stories. So that’s, that applies to whether you’re writing an application or whether you’re an in interview.
That means if you say something like, I volunteered at a hospital from this state to this date, and my jobs were like taking patients to the rooms and also doing paperwork and also working with nurses, whatever. You’re gonna sound the same as everyone else, but if you tell a very detailed story about one specific patient you interacted with, something like, I was volunteering at this hospital and, I, my job was to interact with the patients and keep them company while they were waiting in the waiting room and also take them from room to room.
On one occasion, there was an elderly woman who came into the hospital and she was waiting for some test results back, and she was really nervous and it was my job to sit with her. Before she went into the room to receive those results, I could tell that she was really nervous. So I asked her if she wanted to talk and she said yes, and she said she wanted to be distracted.
So I asked her what she was doing. Later that day, she said she was going to see her son in a violin recite bill. I told her all about my interest in violin and we had a great talk. I asked her more about her son, like that kind of stuff. No one else is gonna have a story like this at that, about like that lady and that her son and his violin recital. So the more detailed you are in your answers. The better the chance is that nobody else is gonna have a story That sounds like yours.
Francesca: Okay. So the first one is in terms of standing out. Be specific with your story.
Emily: Yeah, for sure.
Francesca: So anyone who is applying to medical school, is there anything that you think would catch them off guard about the process?
Emily: Catch them off guard. yeah, so I actually have been an interviewer at a med school. I’m not gonna say which med school, but I have been on the other side, of admissions, not at the same time as I was doing this, but before I started doing this. and I think. The thing that most applicants don’t really understand about interviews is that your interviewers are often just as nervous as you are.
And also they’re super interested in your answers, and it’s also their job to impress you as much as you want to impress them. And I found that because I like kind of lived in the city of the school that I was an interviewer for. If someone was really good in their interview, I wanted them to come to the school because I’d be like, oh, you’re gonna be at this school, you’re gonna be living in my city.
I want you, to want to pick us also, and it really is a two-way street. You don’t have to think of an interview as just like spitting out all your best stories, trying to impress the interviewers, and like, putting on your Best Pony show. It should be kind of a conversation too. And your interviewers also want to impress you. They wanna tell you all the great things about the school because presumably you have multiple interviews and you have all kinds of schools to choose from, and they want you to choose them.
Francesca: All right, so they’re as nervous as the applicants themselves. Is there one, I don’t know if you can think back that far or if you can remember all those applicants, but is there any one particular applicant that really stands out in your mind?
Emily: So many. I was like, I think every, I’m not supposed to like have favorite applicants and I generally don’t. I generally really enjoy spending time with all of the students I work with, and I think they’re all really great. But I do kind of make like a rank order list in my head of the students I work with, and sometimes I’ll hear like, a really great answer.
That’s like better than an answer that I could have given. And that’ll be like the standard answer in my head. And then I’ll kind of compare everyone else’s answers to theirs. And that’s happened a few times. I think like there’s a few people every year where I feel like if they don’t get in, something’s wrong with the system.
Francesca: Wow. Has that ever happened where you thought, okay, no, this is gold standard. This, this applicant is gold standard. They have everything, their answers were perfect and they, didn’t get in. Has that ever happened before?
Emily: No.
Francesca: Okay. Okay. Then the system is not broken.
Emily: Yeah.
Francesca: We can still have faith in it. And where can we find you if we want to learn a little bit more about what you do, about your med prep courses or anything else like that?
Emily: Yeah, so I’m on Instagram as EG med Prep. That’s probably the best place to find me in terms of med prep sort of things. My price list is on there for editing. Also information about the Casper course. I will have interview prep information later on in the season when interviews are starting, for poetry. If you’re interested in that, I write on my maiden name, which is Emily Isaac is, I s a k, so you can just Google me and find books if you’re interested in reading.
Francesca: Last question, I promise. Do you have any either book recommendations or just general recommendations for our prospective med school students?
Emily: Okay. Back to your question about like what is the most common question I get asked by students. A lot of students ask like, what are books I should be reading to prepare for ethics questions or to prepare for like content on the interview? And my answer is always, you don’t need to read anything. There’s nothing that you’re being tested on in terms of content and all of your answers should be deduced by you.
So there’s nothing you need to know other than like what you would know being a person out in the world, reading the news, sometimes engaging on Twitter, whatever else. Just someone who has like basic knowledge. So I don’t actually think that there’s anything you need to read to, you know, be a good applicant or be a good med student. In terms of like preparing for interviews and preparing for ethics questions in terms of just like fun things that I like and reading material and just things, I would recommend in general. I would say, there’s a show called Over the Garden Wall, which is an animated cartoon for children. That’s just really great and I recommend it to everyone all the time.
I think it’s really fun. I also really like podcasts, so I’m excited to be on this one. a podcast I would recommend is Where Should We Begin? Esther Perel’s podcast. It’s a relationship podcast. but I find it’s really insightful and nice to listen to. And then, I mean, I could recommend poetry but, I feel like that’s not, I don’t have a huge audience for that, but poets I like, I mean, Jack Spicer, he’s cool. Yeah, anyone kind of around him is cool. he’s not alive anymore, but he was cool when he was alive.
Francesca: And ‘’ Whistle Stops ‘’ of course.
Emily: Yeah. ‘’ Whistle Stops ‘’, ‘’ Never have I ever ‘’, check those out.
Francesca: Okay. Amazing. Thank you so much, Emily, for spending some time with us. It’s been amazing.
Emily: Awesome. Thanks so much for having me.
Francesca: Thanks for listening to Smart Growth Rocket. If you feel like you’re enjoying these podcasts and that you’re benefiting, I would absolutely love your support. Feel free to share, like, comment, or continue listening wherever it is that you listen to podcasts. Until next time to your success.