Clockwise from top left: Pan, Yagobian, Balogun, Albanowski, Sebastiani and Shah.

First, there are the academic prerequisites, the best-fit research and the MCAT prep and testing; next, there’s perfecting your personal essay and shaping your activities into a compelling narrative, sitting for interviews and visiting campuses.

Applying for medical school often becomes a full-time job for aspiring doctors—and an expensive one, considering that application and testing fees alone can total thousands of dollars per application cycle. This cost prohibits some from entering the medical field, while others spend thousands more on consultants to increase their chances of acceptance.

Into this equity gap steps Giving a Boost, an organization founded by fourth-year University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine student Daniel Pan that connects current medical students with prospective mentees to “provide a local community service,” Pan says, “and free support to those who can’t afford the expensive paid services.”

Giving a Boost, founded in 2019, prioritizes working with young people who self-identify as coming from underrepresented backgrounds—that includes students facing economic disadvantage, students with disabilities and first-generation college students, among others—and lends the expertise of student mentors directly, at no cost. Their support has reached more than 350 mentees who now attend medical schools like Pitt, Harvard, NYU and Yale; the organization—which began at Pitt Med serving Pittsburgh-area undergraduates—is now branching out to schools where former mentees have matriculated. Already, mentees turned mentors have started 30 chapters across the United States.

“I’ve tried to be the mentor I wished I’d had,” says Pan, who did his undergrad at Princeton. His passion for the program, despite his clinical education load and, as we spoke with him, the approach of interviews for residency, is key to its growth and resiliency. "I sometimes feel guilty about not doing enough flash cards or practice questions,” he says, “because, once I get back home, I enjoy working on Giving a Boost more than anything else.”

His commitment and enthusiasm aren’t unique at Pitt Med: “The med students at Pitt are extremely compassionate and love helping, so we’ve been able to get enough mentors every year,” Pan says.

Shiva Yagobian, a second-year Pitt Med student and Pitt undergraduate alum, was a Boost mentee. “From classes, to research, to lifestyle, my mentor was happy to answer all my questions,” she recalls. “The feedback on essays and mock interviews was invaluable.” Yagobian has since returned to Giving a Boost as a mentor, one of 54 at Pitt this year.  

At Rowan-Virtua School of Osteopathic Medicine in New Jersey, second-year medical student Tanvi Shah—who was also a Giving a Boost mentee as an undergrad at Pitt—is in the process of founding a Giving a Boost chapter at her school (where she also serves as president of her class council). She credits her experience as a mentee with helping to shape her application successfully; that process helped her realize “what was important for me to continue to pursue as a medical student”—notably being of service to her community.

Outcomes data collected by Pitt Med Giving a Boost mentors speak to the organization’s success: For the 2020–21 and 2021–22 application cycles combined, 80% of mentees were accepted to medical school, compared with a national acceptance rate of around 40% for the same period. Less than 5% of the surveyed students said that they could have afforded similar paid mentorship and consulting services.

“During my application cycle,” recalls Pan, “I wished I’d known someone in medical school who I could go to for help and advice.” Through Giving a Boost, he’s working to ensure that others will.

Pan is hoping to match into a physical medicine and rehabilitation residency and become a medical educator, so that he can continue to pursue his love of teaching, mentoring and advising, he says.

Helping others achieve their dreams

by Michael Aubele

Zainab Balogun

Alma mater: Thomas Jefferson University
Hometown: Lagos, Nigeria

“My way of coaching . . .” says Zainab Balogun (Pitt Med Class of ’24),  “I’m incredibly honest. I’ll tell all the secrets I know.” Balogun is a Giving a Boost mentor who is also involved with the Student National Medical Association and Pitt Med’s Global Health and Underserved Populations Interest Group. She says it’s easy to find services you can pay for help in crafting a personal essay, yet those don’t often advise on subtleties that medical schools look for. As an interview coordinator at Pitt Med who votes on candidates, she knows when she sees an impressive application.

“So yes, you have good scores, a strong GPA and you volunteer, but who are you outside of medicine? What are the other things that make you unique? Do you speak multiple languages or love to cook?

“I basically try to tell mentees to go beyond the traditional. I’ll say, ‘[We know] you are smart, but you need to show your social side. You need to show what will make you an empathetic physician. If you volunteered or shadowed, what did you get out of it and how long did you do it? You need to have learned something that will impact you as a physician.’”

Romano Sebastiani

Alma mater: University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown
Hometown: Greensburg, Pennsylvania

“The big advantage of this is you’re getting help from people who have gone through the process recently,” says Romano Sebastiani (Pitt Med Class of ’25), who has graduated from being a Giving a Boost mentee to mentor.

“In some cases, through other programs, you can find a mentor in someone who went through this 20 to 30 years ago, which is certainly helpful, but there’s a bit of a divide. With Giving a Boost, you’re working with people who applied one to three years ago and are up to date on current admissions standards.”

Sebastiani, who played basketball for Pitt-Johnstown, says the money it would’ve taken to find a professional coach for his applications seemed out of reach. “You’re talking thousands of dollars,” he says. “It wouldn’t have been possible.” He worked with David Rivetti (MD ’23), who’s now a UPMC physical medicine and rehabilitation resident and who Sebastiani says was an invaluable resource, helping with virtually every step of the application process.

Sebastiani chose to mentor because of how important Giving a Boost was to him. “It was just super helpful, and I’ve tried to take what I’ve learned and use that knowledge to help however I can, from reviewing letters of interest to helping prepare for interviews.”   

Maya Albanowski

Alma mater: University of Pittsburgh
Hometown: Evans City, Pennsylvania

When it came time to consider applying to med schools, Maya Albanowski says she was headed in blind: “My parents weren’t in medicine, so everything I knew about the application process I learned from online forums and YouTube videos.”

As an undergrad at Pitt, she heard about Giving a Boost through a group message from a premed organization. Knowing the steep cost of the application process, she investigated Giving a Boost and wound up with a mentor who gave her very direct and practical advice on how best to approach the process from beginning to end.

“I had a mentor who reviewed my essays—my personal statement and activity statement—and gave great feedback. She explained how many interviews I could expect and then did a mock interview with me.”

Albanowski (now a member of Pitt Med’s Class of ’26) has shifted from mentee to mentor and is working with a Pitt undergrad who has designs on going to medical school. She’s engaged with other mentees at Pitt, too, conducting mock interviews and more informally talking to them about how things are going with their applications.

“My success in my application cycle was only possible because of the phenomenal medical student mentors that I had during college and during the process,” Albanowski says. “We’re part of a field that revolves around helping others, but I think it’s also important to help each other. It makes the whole of the field better and makes for better, healthier medical students.”

Read more from the Winter 2024 issue.