Over a deli sandwich the other day, my friend Jim told me the story of an eleven year-old boy who, many years ago, was stricken with a ruptured appendix. A ravaging abdominal infection took hold; the antibiotics of the day were all but powerless. The ensuing three-month long fight from his hospital bed would change the course of this young boy’s life. His brutal experience with a serious childhood illness forever shaped his view of what an exceptional doctor looks like.
That eleven year-old boy, as it turns out, is my friend Jim, also my-father-in law. He is highly respected and well-known by the medical community as Dr. James Weiss, acclaimed cardiologist and the former Associate Dean for Admissions at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
In his book, “The Rare Find, How Great Talent Stands Out” author George Anders writes of Dr. Weiss, “Without that illness, ‘bedside manner’ might never have been more than a passing phrase to him. Without that illness, he might have taken the easy route of guiding Hopkins’s admissions committee toward picking strictly the candidates with the best grades and scores, rather than looking for the ones with the most caring souls, too.”
In his leadership role in overseeing admissions at Hopkins, Dr. Weiss personally reviewed thousands of medical school applicants and in so doing, the school earned a national reputation for detecting the spark in candidates that other schools would overlook. (Indeed, that expertise is why he was featured in the aforementioned book.)
Dr. Weiss is most proud of his recognition as an early pioneer and champion of diversity, winning an award from the Association of Black Cardiologists in 2004. A few years ago, at a celebration honoring Dr. Weiss’s work in Admissions, a colleague wrote of him, “A tireless champion of diversity in the admissions process, Dr. Weiss emphasized that reviews of each candidate go beyond GPA and MCAT scores, taking into consideration the individual’s life circumstances, community service and leadership activities.”
If anyone knows what it takes to get into an outstanding med school, it’s Dr. James Weiss. That is why I am super proud to tell you I am helping Jim launch his own consultancy, called Medical School Advisory. It is borne from his experience as an eleven year-old, and his career passion to find and champion the candidacy of the best future doctors from, as he puts it, “Every walk of life.”