If you’re approaching med school and looking for an immersive experience in a local community, then Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS) may be on your list. The school’s stated vision is to be “recognized as the most community-oriented school of medicine and health professions in the nation.”
With this goal in mind, Eastern Virginia Medical School draws talent from across the country to Hampton Roads, Virginia, where students train at several medical centers and hospitals that serve a dynamic regional population. An integral piece of the school’s mission is to improve healthcare in Southeastern Virginia.
Here, we’ll discuss Eastern Virginia Medical School’s culture and community-oriented approach to education, and also offer strategies for getting in, including sample secondary essays.
Prospective applicants can pursue a few different tracks to receive an MD degree from Eastern Virginia Medical School:
This post will focus on how to get into the four-year MD program.
As a public institution for higher education, Eastern Virginia Medical School differentiates in-state tuition from out-of-state tuition:
Including other costs such as fees, books, travel, housing, and more, Eastern Virginia Medical School’s total first-year cost of attendance (including loan fees) is $67,142 for in-state students and $90,468 for out-of-state students. The school's tuition and fees website provides additional information about tuition costs and financial aid packages.
To qualify for in-state tuition, accepted students must have been permanent residents of Virginia for at least one year before submitting their initial application for the MD program. For more information, view the guidelines for in-state residency determined by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia.
Don’t let EVMS’s regional focus or #87 ranking from U.S. News & World Report cloud your vision—this is no small-time school. It’s highly competitive. In recent years, EVMS has consistently received over 6,000 applications to fill roughly 151 spots yearly. Their current acceptance rate is just 3.4%.
Let’s take a look at the average GPA and MCAT scores for recent matriculants:
EVMS requires applicants in the 2023–2024 cycle to submit MCAT scores taken between January 2022 and September 2024. Prospective EVMS students must also complete a minimum of 100 semester hours, including the following courses:
The admissions office also strongly recommends taking biochemistry.
The school only considers U.S. citizens and permanent residents for its MD programs.
Applicants to Eastern Virginia Medical School must apply using the AMCAS application. Below is a timeline of important dates and deadlines that you can use to apply to EVMS:
After you submit your application through AMCAS, Eastern Virginia Medical School’s admissions office may ask you via email to write secondary essays. In addition to your medical school personal statement, these essays are another opportunity to share your story and make a case for why you’d be a good fit for EVMS.
The school’s secondary essay prompts for the most recent admissions cycle are below. We’ve offered insight into how to answer each one, plus sample responses that work.
Note that the maximum length for each essay is no more than 2000 characters—roughly 300 words.
Question #1: Briefly describe your exposure to medicine.
Prior to responding to this prompt, make sure the personal statement you send to EVMS in your AMCAS application doesn’t mention every exposure you’ve had to medicine. Save at least one personal anecdote or perspective on medicine for this essay.
Here’s an example:
Growing up in Philadelphia, I was never far away from a hospital. Some of my earliest childhood memories were visiting my aunt at her job as a nurse at Temple University Hospital, where she worked for thirty years. There was also the time when I had to visit Wills Eye Hospital for prescription glasses. Like many elementary school kids, I was both anxious and shy, but the fact that I’d been to the hospital before—with my mother and grandmother—made the space feel familiar and practically homelike, especially since my grandmother had been received with open arms by the hospital during her bout with glaucoma. The sheer number of medical centers in my hometown let me take the presence of healthcare for granted. It’s my belief that all hospitals and local communities should be this integrated.
This mindset influenced my decision to be a high school intern at a suburban hospital for two consecutive summers before I enrolled at the University of Virginia as a premed student. Since then, I’ve completed additional internships at medical centers in my hometown and I’ve worked abroad as a patient representative at a public health clinic in Mexico City. In addition to shadowing physicians, I’ve learned about the patient side of medical care. I want to keep exposing myself to dynamic medical environments and enroll in an MD program that doesn’t draw a line between where the real world ends and specific medical centers begin.
Question #2: What do you think you will like best about being a physician?
Question #3: What do you think you will like least about being a physician?
Question #4: Describe yourself and your medical career as you see it ten years from now.
Question #5: Please indicate your reasons for applying to EVMS.
