Help Us Move Forward!

It is empowering that we already gained over 80 signatures on this petition from across the country in only the first three days that it has been live! Nonetheless, we still have some work to do, and we need everybody’s collective support to succeed. In order for our demands to be met by PSUCOM, we will need to bring their admissions scandal to public attention. This involves two actions: 1) Contact the Chairs of the PA Senate and PA House Appropriations Committees 2) Contact local news agencies with your story We recently discovered that Penn State met with the PA Senate Appropriations Committee to discuss next year’s state funding on Tuesday, February 27, only three days before we were all withdrawn from consideration. Their timing was likely coordinated so that they could have a say in their funding before applicants got angry about their mistake and could say anything about it. We need to contact the same legislators they spoke with about PSUCOM’s gross mismanagement of state funds in this year’s application process before any Penn State funding legislation is passed. That’s why we are urging our supporters to contact the following PA representatives with their stories NOW and demand that funding for the Penn State Hershey Medical Center and the College of Medicine be significantly cut unless Penn State holds itself to all of the demands of our petition. A SAMPLE LETTER that you can copy/paste is provided at the end of this update. PA House Appropriations Committee Majority Chairman Stan Saylor: ssaylor@pahousegop.com PA House Approp. Comm. Minority Chairman Joseph Markosek: jmarkose@pahouse.net PA Senate Approp. Comm. Chair Patrick Browne: pbrowne@pasen.gov PA Senate Approp. Comm Vice-Chair Kim Ward: kward@pasen.gov PA Senate Approp. Comm. Minority Chair Vincent Hughes: hughes@pasenate.com PA Senate Approp. Comm Minority Vice-Chair Judith Schwank: SenatorSchwank@pasenate.com We also need to contact local news agencies with our stories and emphasize the Penn State Scandal that is being covered up which has affected so many of us. THIS STORY WILL BE GOLD for reporters after the Sandusky scandal, but for them to report it requires all of us to show interest in having it be reported. A sample letter that you can fill in and change has been provided below, as well as some PA news agencies that would potentially be interested in reporting this story: ABC 27 News: news@abc27.com CBS 21 News: news@cbs21.com PennLive News: weeklynews@pennlive.com Emails should be sent separately to these news agencies. Thank you all for your continued support in creating this movement! --- EMAIL FOR LEGISLATORS: Copy/Paste all into a single email: ssaylor@pahousegop.com jmarkose@pahouse.net pbrowne@pasen.gov kward@pasen.gov hughes@pasenate.com SenatorSchwank@pasenate.com Dear Representatives and Senators, I am a [Your State] resident whose application to Penn State College of Medicine’s MD program for entry in Fall 2018 was unfairly withdrawn 9 months into the application cycle on March 2nd, 2018, without any advance notice and with no justifiable reason. Penn State has disadvantaged my application and many others from a pool of thousands of applications from across the country by not considering it at all, even though I had applied by the same method as all other applicants and made no mistakes in my submission. Therefore, I was unfairly discriminated against by a state institution’s College of Medicine, which receives millions of dollars in state funds every year. Penn State has grossly mismanaged the funding that was provided to its medical center and College of Medicine last year in this year’s application cycle, and I wanted to express this concern because I know that the university is requesting increased state funding this year. It is absolutely undeserving of increased state funding when it has disadvantaged hundreds of applicants because of an internal mistake on its part. We would like for Penn State’s funding to be significantly cut this year unless it meets the demands of the following petition that we signed on to and provides applicants a transparent and fair application process in future years. So far, even our secondary application fees of $80 per applicant, which were paid directly to Penn State’s College of Medicine, have not been returned, and there has been no statement by Penn State that it will return this money to applicants who were unfairly withdrawn from this year’s applicant pool. https://www.change.org/p/marc-lubbers-demand-transparency-in-md-admissions-at-penn-state-hershey-college-of-medicine We hope that you will consider our request to cut Penn State’s funding and help us demand a transparent and fair application process to the Penn State College of Medicine’s MD Program in future years. Thank you, [Your Name] EMAIL FOR MEDIA AGENCIES: Hello, I would like to report a Penn State Scandal regarding the application process for this year's Admissions cycle to the Penn State College of Medicine for the MD program. The college of medicine receives thousands of applications every year for its’ MD program, and this year, they reported on Friday, March 2, that there was an error on the AMCAS (medical school application system) system that allowed applicants to designate whether they wanted to apply to the MD program only or to the "Medical degree/graduate degree" dual-degree option. They further state that there is no such dual degree option in existence at Penn State (there are MD-MPH and MD-MBA options on the college's website) and because we applied under this program type in the system, they have withdrawn my own and hundreds of other applications from across the country from the applicant pool. There has been zero transparency in this process, and I have been told on numerous occasions that my application was still being reviewed when I called the admissions office this application cycle. However, they now state that my application has not been reviewed even once since I submitted it 8 months ago. Penn State is keeping this scandal very quiet. All applications were submitted via the same process and should have been treated equally across the board. Penn State receives state funding to operate as well, and has dramatically mishandled that funding this year in its application review. Dual-degree applicants were unjustly turned down for admission this cycle for an invalid reason which treats my application differently from thousands of others. Additionally, Penn State has said absolutely nothing regarding a refund of the secondary application fee that went directly to the university, and has stolen every withdrawn student's secondary application fee without any reason. If you go to page 22 of the following thread, you can find that someone has copied the withdrawal email we received into this thread, as well as find other applicants' feedback about the process this year. https://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/2017-2018-pennsylvania-state-university.1247700/page-22 Finally, there is now a petition on change.org demanding transparency in application review for the MD program at Penn State College of Medicine which has received 80 signatures since it was posted on Sunday, March 4: https://www.change.org/p/marc-lubbers-demand-transparency-in-md-admissions-at-penn-state-hershey-college-of-medicine I hope that you will report on this story and if you need more information, you can call me at [phone number]. I just ask that my name and any of my contact information not be shared anywhere for any purpose and that you contact me only once if you would like to learn more from me and report on this story. Thank you, [Your Name]