Educational advising
Whether your next step is graduate, medical, or other professional school, the OITE advisors are here to help as you explore your options and navigate your way to the next adventure.
Our experienced graduate, medical, and professional school advisors can help you:
- Personalized Assessment: Our educational advisors begin by getting to know you and your educational goals. They can help you plan your educational strategy and finalize your list of schools. We appreciate that you may change your mind and will support you through the decision-making process.
- Applications: Your educational advisor will help refine your application documents help you decide how to tell your story in your personal statements and other application components. We will help prepare you for your interviews, whether they are virtual or in-person. If you need guidance to re-application strategies they can help with that too.
- Expert Guidance: Drawing from their extensive expertise and knowledge of current trends in graduate, medical, and professional school education, our advisors provide recommendations and strategies to weigh your options, make decisions, and manage the stress of career planning.
You can make an appointment with one of the following advisors.
- Pre-med/professional only
- Pre-med/professional and pre-grad
- Pre-grad only
Book an appointment now. (You will need to create a new OITE account with your NIH email address to access the booking page. Please follow these instructions.)
The OITE is committed to supporting you and we strive to be available when you need us. However, given the large number of trainees who use our services, we want to clarify the extent and nature of what we can provide.
- Most applicants schedule a maximum of two advising appointments during an application cycle. One appointment focuses on application strategies while other is typically to review a personal statement. We are flexible to address your unique needs and encourage you to be courteous to your peers by being thoughtful about making appointments. We host many virtual Q&A sessions and small group activities to supplement our individual advising program.
- To maintain availability for others, we ask that you book one appointment, with one advisor, at a time. All staff have been trained for consistency so you need not contact multiple staff for different perspectives.
- Please cancel your appointment as soon as you know that you will be unable to make it. This allows us to schedule other trainees and is respectful of us.
- Our application material reviews critique the structure and organization of near-final documents and do not include correction of grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors.
- We can only review your personal statement once and we cannot review secondaries for medical school applicants.
- We can discuss strategies for composing responses to questions focused on diversity and being from a disadvantaged background.
Our workshops, courses, Q&As, and other resources support you every step of the way. We also coordinate with the OITE well-being team to offer workshops and small group discussions focused on application stress, performance anxiety, the long wait for schools to get back to you, and the disappointment of rejection. We will support you through the stress of the process and welcome you to talk about reapplication strategies while hoping they are not needed. All of our events are advertised online and in our daily emails. Trainees who start the process early do better than those who wait,
Our team has developed specific activities for:
Appointments
Find available appointments and meet with an educational advisor. (You will need to create a new OITE account with your NIH email address to access the booking page. Please follow these instructions.)