Every October, seniors in the Program in Liberal Medical Education receive an email from their academic deans asking whether they will be matriculating to Warren Alpert Medical School the following fall. They can either accept their spot at Warren Alpert, reject it or defer it to take a gap year. “So many of my (non-PLME) classmates took gap years and were taking the MCAT or applying to medical school during their gap year,” Hamsa Shanmugam ’24 MD’29 said. Despite the guaranteed admission to medical school, some students took gap years to further develop their medical experience. She was worried of being “left behind by her friends,” with whom she would have otherwise continued to medical school.