Forget the days when the ranks of first-year medical students were mostly filled with recent college graduates who majored in chemistry, biology or another one of the hard sciences. Today’s medical students comprise perhaps the most diverse assembly schools have ever seen.

This emerging trend is a reflection of evolving standards for medical school admission, which have grown to focus on requisite skills instead of conventional backgrounds. It’s an approach that third-year student Peg Bicker is happy to embrace. Bicker, who hails from the aforementioned world of sculpting and who possesses both a bachelor’s and master’s of fine arts from Emporia State University, finds more similarities than you might think between the two fields.

“It’s helpful to have a background in something with a high degree of uncertainty,” Bicker said. “The materials and knowledge are different, but you still are able to find the solution for your current situation.”

Bicker’s journey to medical school began with a joke at a cocktail party. Chatting with another guest, she mused that if for some reason her sculpting career didn’t succeed, “there’s always medical school.”

“We both laughed, but then I thought ’why not?’” Bicker recalls. “The idea wouldn’t die, so I started doing research and then took some classes.”

While Bicker made her way to medical school in a relatively circuitous way, for fellow third-year student Anne Hogsett, the dream of being a doctor was ever-present, but consistently delayed. Hogsett worked for decades as an engineer before finally pursuing her medical dreams.

“I majored in chemistry, but I always knew I wanted to be a doctor,” Hogsett said. “My husband and I got married two weeks after college graduation, and from there we always had to work and raise our kids.”

While working a series of engineering jobs, including the production of wastewater treatment systems and raising her family, Hogsett realized that the dream of becoming a doctor had not faded with time.

“In 1999, my husband asked if I still thought about med school, and I said ‘of course,’” Hogsett said. “So I took one class a semester for seven years, subjects like Chem 1 and Organic 1, and now here I am.”

Both Bicker and Hogsett agree the challenges were intimidating, particularly when it came to relearning basic pre-medical skills. All of the changes and revolutions in scientific fields were overwhelming.

“When I studied genetics in 1981, we only had pea plants and redeyed flies,” Hogsett said. “We couldn’t imagine mapping the entire human genome.”

“The sheer amount of information is unbelievable.” Bicker said. “You have to take it one step at a time, but each step gets a little easier to take.”

When students with an unconventional academic background enter medical school, they often find themselves in a maelstrom of competitiveness they haven’t experienced in the past. They can also be tagged with the “nontraditional” label.

One could make the case that, with the evolving opinion of what constitutes a promising future physician, no medical student is truly traditional these days. More and more medical students are chucking the conventional college-to-grad-school path in favor of work experience, family life, or some combination thereof. And with that trend comes a whole new set of evaluation criteria. “Nontraditional students bring a breadth of experience that many younger applicants simply don’t have, just based on their ages,” said Sandra McCurdy, MEd, associate dean for admissions at the KU School of Medicine. “If they are undertaking such a major life change, we need to determine if they have the best skills. Are they good communicators? Do they have the necessary maturity and drive?”

The School of Medicine routinely receives applications from hopefuls in their 40s and 50s, but age is neither a qualifying nor a disqualifying factor. McCurdy said the goal is to assemble the best and most diverse class possible. “If accepting a certain student helps us add to the learning environment of the class, then it doesn’t matter how old that student is,” She said. “We look for motivation, passion, and understanding as part of our admissions criteria.” Just as top universities spent the 1990s moving away from a strict focus on academics and toward a holistic view of the applicant as more than just a student, so too are graduate and professional schools rethinking the admissions process.