Just kidding! Mayo Med School mistakenly sends acceptance letters to every applicant
Getting an email of acceptance, especially for something career or education-related, is one of the best feelings in the world. It signifies hard work paying off.
For hundreds of prospective Mayo medical students, it happened Thursday — for about three hours.
Over 350 acceptance emails to Mayo Clinic Alix School of Medicine were mistakenly sent out Thursday morning, sending nervous applicants into a frenzy. The Mayo pre-med forum on the Student Doctor Network was filled with happy stories - some got “victory lunch,” some called their parents, some even cancelled interviews with other med schools - before the truth came out.
The emails were sent because of a glitch, and Mayo had to walk the whole thing back a few hours later.
“Mayo Clinic Alix School of Medicine erroneously emailed 364 letters of acceptance to talented, engaging individuals seeking an appointment to the medical school,” said Mayo spokesperson Heather Carlson Kehren in a statement. “Soon after the emails were sent, a technical error was discovered and the letters of acceptance were withdrawn by email. All affected applicants have been contacted by phone. We deeply regret having caused disappointment to these applicants, and we are continuing to investigate the issue."
The email revoking acceptance (which students chastised for not technically apologizing about the situation) said Mayo will continue to offer acceptances through early next week. For now, though, a couple hundred prospective students are back in the dark.
The whole situation — understandably — rubbed these students the wrong way.
“People made decisions, possible irreversible ones, based on the first email,” one user wrote on the forum. “People need to know how/if they need to address those decisions. They need an actual decision, not a possible appointment next week. I don't need my ‘appointment’ as a phone call. Just send an email with the actual admissions decision. I sincerely hope this isn't indicative of other processes at this school, because this is unnerving.”
So, when something this important to many people goes this haywire, what’s the best way to respond? Some were angry, others apathetic, but a few found humor. A post calling to send 500 boxes of old mayonnaise to the Clinic’s doorstep gained traction on Reddit’s r/premed forum Thursday night, after the dust had settled on the whole fracas. (“As applicants we have no power in this process, so the only thing we can do is send them hundreds of gallons of mayonnaise,” said one commenter.)
A Student Doctor Forum member with the username AmaranthMoor may have said it best by putting it into poetry:
In this chaotic mess of a thread
The mob howls and demands Mayo’s head
Could the poor staff not tell?
Did they not know that Hell
Hath no fury like a scorned premed?
Isaac Jahns is a Rochester native and a 2019 graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism. He reports on politics, business and music for Med City Beat.
H/t to Jeff Kiger for scouting out this story first.
