Application For An Academic Leave Of Absence: Fill & Download for Free

As the resident medical school dropout, I'll say that it really depends on why you're leaving and what you're planning to do once you're "out."I'll tell you what lead me to consider leaving school, some of the reactions I received once I did, and how I've felt since. Obviously, this is anecdotal since one only leaves medical school once but here goes:I left medical school in 2009 on a personal leave of absence. In my particular instance, there was no academic distress and i left in good standing. I had simply felt uninspired by the culture I found myself in and that coupled with the demands of medical training made for a pretty depressing existence.I had been working part-time through my first year of school and taught full time the summer after that year at UCSD. I really enjoyed teaching and thought it might be good to investigate possible alternatives and see if i "missed" medicine. So while the circumstances under which I left weren't exactly "happy," they weren't dire either. There is certainly a lot of unacknowledged struggle within medical school classes, though, I'd say. Most students feel ashamed or even afraid to admit they're unhappy or struggling academically for fear that it will make them look weak. Again, this is my experience. I would urge anyone facing extreme circumstances to seek help.When I left, I got a wide-range of responses. I literally received everything from "WTF is wrong with you?" to "FUCK YEAH. Best decision you've ever made!" I also received a fair amount of indignant reactions to the tune of "Don't you know more than 50% of applicants are rejected?! How dare you take their space!" In the beginning, to be honest, I wasn't exactly sure what my next move was and I let these comments affect me in negative ways. But honestly, I wouldn't have known unless I had tried. After I left, I started working full-time in medical content development for Kaplan in their corporate office in NYC. Since then, I've worked mostly with startups developing multi-channel platforms, business intelligence, media distribution, etc etc etc...My career continues to evolve. And the more successful and further away from medical school I get, the less surprised people are that I decided to leave. I believe that we are a product of all of our experiences and that, somehow, it all make sense eventually. I decided to take a chance on that leave of absence and have been running with it ever since. I wish i could have figured it out before taking out $50k in loans, but I feel grateful that I didn't wait until I had $200k!My advice if you're considering a change is to dip your toes in. Don't be afraid to talk about it with others! Discuss your options with your superiors/deans.Medicine is an extremely valuable and honorable calling, but I felt that I could better serve the world in some other way. So I left. And the world hasn't ended yet. So, at least, there's that :)

Editorial note: Michael O'Brien posted his outstanding answer as I was drafting mine, and you'd be extremely well advised to take his advice.I think I ran across the question asker while I was in graduate school at the University of Michigan, so I feel particularly compelled to answer this question:First, to answer your overall question, there are successful graduates of virtually every college. I feel like there is a tendency in the U.S. to place too much emphasis on getting into a prestigious college, or to place too much value on the perceived prestige of the college that one attended. It is by far better to graduate with a respectable GPA (let's say > 3.0) from an unheralded college than to graduate (if the college will even let you graduate) with a terrible GPA (< 2.0) from a prestigious college.Second, I would reiterate Christopher Fox's point that poor study habits are probably the root cause of your poor academic performance. To address that, you may be better off taking an academic leave of absence or transferring from Michigan and trying to rebuild your study habits in a lower-pressure academic environment. That could be Michigan State University; that could be someplace like Oakland University or Eastern Michigan University; or it could be a community college like Washtenaw Community College.Third, since you volunteered the detail about being trespassed from the University for serially crashing corporate information sessions and student organization meetings for the free food, I want to point out a few things specific to that detail:First, most colleges do not have the volume of corporate information sessions and student organization meetings serving free food that can be found at the University of Michigan College of Engineering.Second, the primary purpose of these corporate information sessions and student organization meetings is not to feed you free food. In many cases, the food at these events is sponsored by the company hoping to solicit job applications from Michigan Engineering students. When the sponsors see students dining and dashing without staying for the meeting, or if they see the students staying for the meeting but being overtly inattentive during the corporate presentation, this reflects poorly on the student group hosting the meeting, the College of Engineering, and the University of Michigan.Third, if you are who I think you are, you should be aware that you gained some notoriety among the engineering student organizations for serially crashing meetings for free food, including crashing several such events in a single evening. Several student organizations received negative feedback from corporate sponsors because the sponsor noticed you taking free food and not staying for the meeting, or otherwise taking free food and being overtly inattentive.Fourth, you should know that this behavior is not normal and is not generally socially accepted. If you can control it, then you should stop. If you can't, then you should probably seek help in identifying why you engage in this behavior, and what you can do to bring it in control.

No. That's a ridiculous assumption. Columbia Univeristy is made up of four colleges (and numerous graduate programs): Columbia College (co-ed), Barnard College (all women), SEAS (school of engineering), and General Studies (for people who have taken an extended leave of absence before college, like serving in the military). just because Barnard has a marginally higher acceptance rate that Columbia (barely, and remember they don't have male applicants), doesn't mean BC students wouldn't get into CC. More often than not, they applied to BC because academics are more rigorous, they wanted an all female environment, or their area of study had more experts at BC than CC.