@Roentgen I’m happy to share and contribute to this thread since I got so much out of it! I’ve had several people message me so I thought I would just address everything out in the open.
To begin, I’m instate and had a 3.92 unweighted GPA with a 32 ACT score.
With my stats, ACT score and being instate, I felt I had a decent shot at the program. I spent approximately, 3-4 weeks working on my essays with the help of my parents, siblings, friends, school teachers. Everyone was wonderful and reviewed my essays giving me helpful feedback on what they thought my application lacked. My teacher also suggested that I should get my application reviewed by a former UMKC SOM adcom member prior to submitting to see if there was something glaringly missing from my application. I told my parents about it and they thought it was a good idea, so we went ahead with it. We submitted my entire application (including reference letters) for review. I don’t know exactly who from UMKC reviewed it (so please don’t ask me) because in the feedback I received, everything was blurred out except for the @umkc.edu portion, but as it turns out, they felt my application had two glaring red flags, that in hindsight, I’m not sure how ALL of us missed, but I’m so glad we put my application in the hot seat and got that sorted out before submitting. I’m so thankful for my teacher, because I don’t think my application would have made the first cut otherwise.
Wasn’t worried about the Toledo exam.
Next came the MMI.
I began my interview prep in December, because I was told ahead of time I had a ~70% chance of receiving an interview at UMKC. I started out just googling MMI UMKC BA/MD to see what was out there and sure enough this thread was one of the hits! I bought two books from Amazon, MMI for the Mind and MMI Winning Strategies. I found MMI for the Mind much more realistic and comparable to what I had on my UMKC interview (minus the acting stations) as a lot of the scenarios were not too technical and medical. MMI Winning Strategies was ok, but the problem was many of the MMI scenarios in there are very technical (ie. your patient does this, you are their doctor) and in most cases, as a high schooler, I thought they were way above my head and assumed that you had some background medical knowledge. I thought the scenarios in MMI Winning Strategies were definitely not representative of the scenarios I had for my UMKC interview.
I basically spent the first two weeks of January just practicing scenarios I could find for free on the internet with family, friends, teachers. My hs teacher told me that my answers were “ok”. My mom suggested that I sign up for a practice MMI session with a company that she read had a lot of success with the UMKC BA/MD program. So I had my first practice MMI session with them even before I found out whether I would receive an interview from UMKC. It was a real confidence killer initially because I was told basically my answers lacked this, lacked that etc. Then the great news (INTERVIEW INVITE!!!) came at the end of January and I continued these interview sessions on a weekly basis all the way through until a week before my real interview, in addition to practicing with family, friends, teachers on what I had learned during these sessions on a daily basis. I also read up on the UW bioethics site which is free and in my opinion more than enough for the ethics portion of the UMKC interview.
Looking back, I definitely felt well prepared for my UMKC interview, but had my parents not enrolled me in weekly practice MMI sessions, I think I would have been under prepared in a lot of ways, because receiving help from those around me was in a lot of ways, kinda like the blind helping the blind (love you mom!).
Overall, I really enjoyed my MMI interview at UMKC and there were definitely a number of things that helped make me stand out. In terms of the MMI interviews at UMKC, they are generally very relaxed (except for 1 station!!) and felt like were more of a hybrid mix (instead of being true MMI … if you know what I mean). The stations were exactly as I had practiced in terms of content/follow up questions and in two of the stations, I even had an interviewer tell me EXCELLENT! after I gave my response (although I was told in advance that might not mean much)… lol.
Anyhow, that’s my perspective and I hope it helps! Phew … excuse my long post !!!