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As a first year medical student, I was attacked and raped a few days before my first set of exams as I was walking home from school. I probably didn't handle it exactly as I should have, but I did tell my school's administration who told me that my options were either take a leave of absence or else fail my exams (they weren't supportive or helpful at all unfortunately). I wasn't offered any make-up exams or even a few days of excused absences since my school has a mandatory attendance policy. I opted to try to take the tests anyways after I talked to a few professors who were more understanding as to why I wouldn't want to let this experience affect my life by taking a leave of absence and having all that free time to think of what happened to me, and I ended up failing a couple of classes due to my performance on that first set of exams, which meant that I had to retake those classes the following year and graduate a year late.
I'm now a full time 2nd year student and I'm thankfully doing well in school, but my life still feels like its a bit in shambles. I still can't sleep at night, I'm easily startled, I can barely hold my concentration, and I've been diagnosed with both PTSD and clinical depression. I was given a prescription for an antidepressant which I still haven't gotten filled because I heard that it will make me a poor applicant when it comes to residency. Due to the fact that I've failed several classes, I know that I'm already a poor candidate and I don't want to make my already weak application even worse.
So that leaves me with several questions. First, how badly will the fact that I failed classes hurt me when applying to residencies? Will they even consider such a bad student? Secondly, is my story something that I should disclose to programs in an effort to explain my academic performance? And lastly, should I avoid taking the medications that I was prescribed in order not to hurt my resume further? Thank you in advance for your time and consideration.
First, it's horrible that you've had this terrible experience, and I wish you the best as far as recovery is concerned.
As far as your school's response, I don't think they honestly have much choice. You could have taken a leave of absence to help address the acute trauma of the event. If the school makes some sort of an exception for you (more time, delayed exams, etc), then they will need to start making exceptions for others -- someone who's parent becomes ill or dies, someone who breaks up with their spouse/SO, etc. It's a slippery slope to decide who "deserves" some sort of accomodation, and who doesn't. I'm not suggesting that your situation doesn't rise to the level that "something" could have been done, but hopefully you can see that this can lead others charging that their issues were not addressed fairly. So the fairest way to address this, for everyone, is via a leave of absence.
Regardless, addressing your questions:
It's clearly not good, but if you can recover, pass the second time, and do well on Step 1, you can certainly make the argument that the issue is behind you. You'll need to decide whether you plan to talk about this in your application at all.First, how badly will the fact that I failed classes hurt me when applying to residencies? Will they even consider such a bad student?
Programs consider people who fail some 1st year classes all the time. Not all fields may be an option -- Derm, Rads, Ortho, Ophthal, Urology, etc are all quite competitive, and failures in medical school may mean that those fields are not options. But many fields will still be open if your performance improves. The key is to prove to people is that this issue will not affect your future performance.
Secondly, is my story something that I should disclose to programs in an effort to explain my academic performance?
This is a difficult question to answer. You certainly can, and if you do, it's almostr certain to come up at your interview. If you do disclose it (in your personal statement, or elsewhere), you're implicitly giving people permission to discuss it as part of your application. You'll have to decide whether you're ready to talk about it to complete strangers.
And lastly, should I avoid taking the medications that I was prescribed in order not to hurt my resume further?
Somehow, you have gotten some very bad advice. No one is going to care whether you are on antidepressants or not. In fact, no one is going to know, since you don't need to tell them. The most important thing is for you to succeed in medical school. With the symptoms you are describing, I worry that you really haven't recovered from your attack. You need to get your symptoms under control -- whether that will require medication, further counseling, a leave of absence, or some combination is unknown. But given what you've described above, I worry that if you don't address your problems, they will only get worse, affect your performance again, and then you'll have a real problem.