Seventy. That's how many medical school rejections I got across two application cycles. Forty in the first, thirty in the second. I kept count because at some point keeping count stopped being masochism and started being a ledger.
I wasn't an obvious candidate. First-generation, immigrant family, son of a father who worked three jobs in a new country so I could go to school. I was told by college advisors, politely and then less politely, that medicine might not be the path. I wasn't unintelligent. I was undistinguished. MCAT fine, not great. GPA respectable, not flashy. No nepotism, no connections, no physician in the family to make a phone call.
The first round, I applied to forty schools. I got into none. I did not get waitlisted for most of them. I got the form letters. I got the silence that is somehow louder than the form letters. And I had to do what a lot of people can't bring themselves to do, which is tell the family who had been rooting for this since I could pronounce the word doctor that the thing had not happened.
I took a gap year. Then a second. Then a third.
Here is what I want to say about the gap years, because the lazy version of this story says he waited three years and then got in. That is not what happened.
The gap years were not waiting. They were a marathon in disguise.
I scribed for two full years alongside twenty-five emergency physicians. I was in the room for the codes, the pediatric fevers, the old men with chest pain, the young women with pelvic pain, the drunks, the suicides, the miracles. I wrote the notes. I saw medicine practiced before I was even accepted to practice it. Most of my eventual classmates had never seen a chest tube placed when they started medical school. I had seen dozens.
I tutored. A thousand hours at AJ Tutoring. A hundred and eighty hours of MCAT coaching at HeyTutor. A hundred and eighty hours of academic consulting at Merit Education. Simultaneously. I was teaching other people how to take the exam I had barely cleared — which forced me to understand it at a depth I hadn't the first time around.
I read. Fifteen-plus self-improvement books. I traveled to twenty-plus countries, not as tourism but as reconnaissance: what does a life look like when it's not structured around the next exam? I studied Navy SEAL psychology and started a meditation practice that is still the anchor of my mornings. I was building a person who could survive medical school, not a person who could get into one.
I put the second application together. I got thirty more rejections. And then Rush University Medical College said yes.
It's tempting to tell this like a comeback story. Rejection as villain, acceptance as resolution. That's not how I hold it now.
The seventy rejections didn't delay my story. They were my story.
Without them I would have gone from college into medical school at twenty-two — undercooked, confident in ways I hadn't earned. Without the scribing I wouldn't have known what a physician actually does on a Tuesday at 3 a.m. Without the tutoring I wouldn't have learned how to teach, which has become the through-line of my career. Without the meditation practice I wouldn't have had the frame to get through residency without burning out.
The specific breaks became the specific strengths. That is not a metaphor. That is a ledger.
When I tell this to the premed I occasionally mentor, the piece I want them to hear is this: don't try to skip the years that don't look like a plan. The plan is a concept. The years that don't look like a plan are the actual education.
Most of what's made me a physician I didn't learn in medical school.
I learned to work through fatigue scribing overnight shifts when I was nineteen. I learned what elite performance looks like as a Division I dragon-boat athlete — twenty hours a week of training, our team finishing number one in the nation. I learned to teach by teaching. I learned to handle the hard conversation by being in thousands of rooms before I was allowed to lead one. I learned what I valued by having my plan taken away from me sixty-nine times and trying again.
The seventy rejections are the foundation of the practice. They are not a story of resilience — they are a story of conversion. The raw material was unpromising. The process was slow. What came out is not what went in.
That is the repair. That is the gold.