Scholarship tips for medical school [PODCAST]

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“According to AAMC, the median debt for medical students in 2019 was $200,000. Unfortunately, fundraising for scholarships was difficult for many organizations due to the pandemic despite more students seeking out scholarships. Luckily, more anonymous generous donors have helped the next generations of physicians in recent years, but what happens if you are not as lucky to go to one of those tuition-free schools? Frankly, your options are limited. You can invest, work, apply for scholarships. While I am not an expert in the first two, I would consider myself knowledgeable on the last topic. I started undergraduate with only 25 percent of my tuition covered. Medical school offered me nothing. As a third-year medical student, I fully self-funded my undergraduate tuition and am steadily working towards funding my medical tuition through just scholarships. I wanted to share with you some tips on decreasing your debt.”

Trisha Chau is a medical student.

She shares her story and discusses her KevinMD article, “8 scholarship tips for medical school.”

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Hosted by Kevin Pho, MD, The Podcast by KevinMD shares the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from.

Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show, where we share the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. My name is Kevin Pho, founder and editor of KevinMD. Today on the show we have Trisha Chau. She is a medical student, and she wrote the KevinMD article “8 scholarship tips for medical school.” Trisha, welcome to the show.

Trisha Chau: Thank you for having me.

Kevin Pho: We’ll get into your article in a little bit, but first off, can you share your story and journey to where you are today?

Trisha Chau: Yeah. I am currently a third-year medical student at Oregon Health & Science University. Since I was 15, I have been working jobs: tutor, piano teacher, conference assistant, you name it. But I quickly realized that the money that I saved wouldn’t pay for college so easily. So at the end of high school, I started applying for scholarships. We got just enough, but not enough to fully go to college. But I said that this may be my ticket, my way out, to not being in debt. Through years of applying to scholarships, I have wanted to help others who were in the same boat as me. And so this is where I am today, and I’ve been going at it since.

Kevin Pho: All right. And we’re going to talk about some of the tips that you learned during your own scholarship journey. But before we do that, give us some context. Can you comment on the cost of medical education today and some trends of those costs going forward?

Trisha Chau: Yeah. The current cost could be anywhere from $180,000 to at least a quarter of a million dollars, and more students are in debt, with about $200,000. The trend is unfortunately going up, and the pandemic has made it worse, with a lot of schools not promising the same cost of tuition as students stay in medical school. And so the tuition has been increasing. But also, there are schools out there and generous donors who have helped future physicians to fund medical school, so they don’t have to worry about this cost.

Kevin Pho: And to clarify, this cost is in addition to whatever undergraduate and master’s degree loans that people have, correct?

Trisha Chau: Yes.

Kevin Pho: Scholarships certainly are one way to mitigate these costs, and we’ll talk about that in your KevinMD article, “8 scholarship tips for medical school.” Now, for those who didn’t get a chance to read that article, if you could walk my audience through it and share the story of why you decided to write it, that’d be great.

Trisha Chau: A lot of future students have reached out to me, saying, “Hey, you’ve gone through this. We know that you paid part of your school or even all of your school through self-funding. How do you do it?” And so I wanted to reach a broader audience, and I listed some of the tips that I have gone through.

In undergrad, it was a lot of track locally. I was from a small community, from a small college town, and so there were a lot of local scholarships that helped me get through college. But then when I got to medical school, I realized that I’m in a big town now. There’s not as much funding for medical students, and you’re going to have to compete nationally. It was a lot harder to get funding just because you’re competing with some of the best applicants. And so through the last three-ish years, I have had a lot of various obstacles in getting funded, but I have also found other ways to do so.

So, checking with organizations that you’re part of, and reaching out to people that you know, even if you don’t think they know of anything. You would be surprised. For me, my judo instructor, he’s the one who told me about the NMF scholarship, the National Medical Foundation. And then creating my own technique: using Google keyword searches, using the word “scholarship,” “memorial,” and the due dates, often at the end of the month or the beginning of the month. Using keywords like that has made me find unusual scholarships, unique ones that not many people know of.

Kevin Pho: Give us a sense of how big these scholarships are. How much money, in general, for these smaller ones, and how many people are you competing with?

Trisha Chau: For the smaller ones, I don’t know just how many people are applying, because they are not as well known, but they can range anywhere from $500 to $5,000. Whereas the big ones, like PD Soros and the Tylenol scholarships, can range anywhere from $10,000 to $90,000. Again, you’re competing with some of the best. I have tried it before; unfortunately, I didn’t get it. But I continue to try every year.

Kevin Pho: Give us a sense, in terms of you and other medical students, how many of these small scholarships can one obtain, say, in a given year?

Trisha Chau: I would say it’s really based on how many applications you put in, right? If it is very local, you may have one or two. For me, it ranges a lot by what year I am in. For medical students, a lot of them target third and fourth years, because at that time they kind of know what they want to do, whether that is primary care or whether that’s surgical. And so a lot of scholarships have targeted those students. But for local funding, as long as you are a resident in that state, they’re like, “Oh, you’re a medical student? Well, you will qualify.” They don’t really care about your specialty, as long as you make an impact in the future.

Kevin Pho: Now take us through the application process of a typical independent scholarship like this. What exactly does that entail?

Trisha Chau: Often it’s just the demographic information, with an essay about what you want to do in the next 10 years. So you often have to think very far in advance, right? One of my tips is just to try to think about what kind of impact you can make, specifically what kind of impact, often to underserved communities. What kind of changes do you want to make? If you weren’t going to be a doctor, what would not be there in the future, if you were not going to be a doctor? Often it’s those who think of these grand ideas that pick up evaluators’ interest.

And just be honest in your application. They know when you are faking it. Using personal stories also helps to tell them, “Hey, this is how I got to where I am today, and I have constantly shown that.” And then showing, “This is how I got here, and then this is what I want to do with it. I want to contribute back to my community because other people have helped me.”

Kevin Pho: Now, do these independent scholarship applications have an interview component to them?

Trisha Chau: I’ve only come across one. Most of them do not.

Kevin Pho: One of your tips that you wrote was “Connections matter.” Tell us more about that specific tip. Why do they matter, and how does a prospective medical student get those connections?

Trisha Chau: It matters a lot. I think my first one was when I was volunteering at a senior community home, playing the piano. This very senior lady came up to me, like, “Oh, what college are you going into?” She was very sweet about it, and she’s like, “Oh, have you heard of” one of the scholarships that she was once a part of. And I’m like, “Oh, no.” And so that’s how I learned early and quickly that connections matter.

It’s really just going out there, whether it’s volunteering, working, or getting your name out, reaching out to the faculty, talking to them, and just sharing with them, “Hey, medical school is expensive. I don’t know what to do.” They may or may not know of the scholarships, but they do know people, and so they will often refer you to someone that they know who is an expert on scholarships. So honestly, don’t be afraid. Just put yourself out there. The worst they can say is no.

Kevin Pho: Now, it sounds like you have to do a lot of sleuthing to look for these independent small scholarships. So there’s really no centralized place that you can go to? Are there any consultants that you could hire to do this for you? Because it sounds pretty independent, something that you really do on your own. Is that fair to say, that there’s no centralized place where you could find these scholarships?

Trisha Chau: One of the centralized scholarship databases that I have found, and that people have recommended, was the University of California, Irvine financial aid and scholarship external scholarship database. I think they have one of the most comprehensive national databases out there, so that is one I highly recommend to your audience. But in terms of the independent scholarships, no, because it varies from state to state, and I don’t know of any database that has all the states and whatnot. There could be ones for individual states, but that is a lot of students, the student doctors, trying to find them on their own.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Trisha Chau. She is a medical student. She wrote the KevinMD article “8 scholarship tips for medical school.” Trisha, can you give us a sense of how long it takes to do all these applications to all these smaller independent scholarships? And when in the medical school process? Well, I’m going to assume that they probably already got accepted to medical school, but just in general, when in the process should they be starting to look for these independent scholarships?

Trisha Chau: I think it’s year-round. I’m surprised, because in undergrad, it’s often in spring or winter that most of the applications are due, because the beginning of the year is in August. So it makes sense for it to be due in winter or spring, so that they have funding for the following year. But through my experience, I’ve seen fall, winter, every month. I have my own tiny database of what I am eligible for, and I try to keep a list of that.

Once you get a lot of the scholarships, they ask similar questions: “What are you doing now? What are you planning to do in the future? Who inspired you to go into medicine?” Those are often the top three topics. And so as long as you have a good story for that, you can take a spin on it, and applying to scholarships shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours afterwards. I’m a terrible writer; I have friends who help me edit them, and so I’m very thankful to them for helping me. But I would say, for a typical student, it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours after they have had their first couple of scholarships in.

Kevin Pho: And my final question: What’s your take-home message that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience?

Trisha Chau: It’s a privilege to be able to find the scholarships. I know a lot of students have other obligations to fulfill, and like you said, it is a lot of sleuthing, but there are also databases out there, like the UCI one, that make it a lot easier. I am personally on the LMSA, the Latino Medical Student Association West, as scholarship chair, and we have been creating more scholarships for Latinx students. And so for any Latinx pre-med, whether you’re in high school or a medical student or in undergrad, look us up. We have scholarships available. And really reach out to me if you have any other questions. I’m more than happy to talk with them.

Kevin Pho: And how can people reach you?

Trisha Chau: The LinkedIn bio is connected to my article, and so people have reached me that way, and also my email. My school email is at OHSU. I often just email whenever I have time or don’t want to study, so I’m more than happy to talk. I’ve had a couple of people reach out, and I really find enjoyment in helping them when I can.

Kevin Pho: Trisha, thank you so much for sharing your time and insight, and thanks again for being on the show.

Trisha Chau: Thank you very much for having me. I enjoyed it.

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