The most hands-on work I do · One physician on every irreversible call
You cannot rerun this cycle. You can stop deciding it alone.
A BS/MD year is a short list of decisions that do not come back: which programs, which story, which draft goes out the door, Early Decision or not, what to do with the offer. One mistake on that list has no second cycle to fix it in. Dean's List is the most personal thing I do: the former assistant dean in your corner for every one of those calls, from the first strategy session to the last secondary, then close through the first semester after admission, whichever door your student walks through, the BS/MD seat or a regular college as a premed. Past that, an optional semester-by-semester retainer runs all the way toward the white coat. The work stays theirs. The judgment is mine.
Month to month while we work together. You only ever pay for work already done.
Led by Dr. Rory Merritt: a graduate of one of the country's most selective combined BS/MD programs, a board-certified emergency physician, and a practicing physician today, a former Assistant Dean in Brown's PLME, former Co-Chair of the AAMC's BA-MD Affiliate Group, and first author of the Academic Medicine study on combined BA-MD program graduates (2021).
- Mar to MayA full diagnostic, then the school list built on real fit
- JunEssay architecture: the story chosen while it can still change
- Jul to AugDrafts to done: every primary, the activities named right
- Sep to NovSubmission, every piece read before it goes out
- Dec to FebInterview preparation, live MMI and Casper practice
- Mar to AprWeigh the offers, decide with clear eyes
- Aug to DecThe first semester after: monthly check-ins, the wobble caught early, a straight account home
The year, in full
What the year includes.
- A full diagnostic and roadmap to begin the year, a plain look at where your student stands
- Your BS/MD application list, finalized together, built on fit
- Essay architecture and refinement, every primary and a defined set of secondaries
- Working meetings with the student, biweekly through the build and crunch, monthly when the pace eases
- A quarterly family meeting, the strategic checkpoint for parents
- Weekly-to-biweekly email between meetings, closer through the crunch
- Deadline and project management, with a coordinator at every meeting
- Interview preparation, including MMI and Casper, if invited to interview
- Help weighing your acceptances when the offers arrive
- Direct access to Dr. Merritt, the entire cycle
The work itself
Before you consider the year, read the record it produces.
I keep a running file on every Dean's List student: the calls, the reasons, and the dates, the way a physician keeps notes on a patient on service. Families call it the Notebook. Below is a year of one, condensed and fictional, so you can see the judgment you are buying and how it moves as the file does.
April · The first assessment · Fictional sample
Strong transcript, real clinical hours, and a story that is not findable yet: the file argues three different students at once, the researcher, the volunteer, the captain who organizes everything. That is normal in April, and I wrote the family exactly that. Nothing is wrong. Nothing is chosen either, and October rewards chosen. Rated the list aspirational (eleven names, picked by reputation), the story scattered, the interview untested. We start with the list.
May · The school-list build · An overrule, in writing · Fictional sample
Recommend we cut the third program on the draft list, despite its name. Its combined curriculum is built around early research immersion, and this file argues bedside, not bench: the strongest true sentence in the whole application is about the dialysis unit, and it will carry more weight at the two programs whose curricula reward sustained patient work. One of those two also asks less of her weakest area in its continuation terms, which matters for the years after the yes, not just the application. And the hours are finite. A fourteenth application costs us the two secondaries that decide the most. Fewer doors, each opened properly.
July · Essay architecture · Fictional sample
The draft the family liked most is the one I recommended against. It is competent and warm, and four hundred other applicants could have written it: resilience, the big game, the grandmother. The paragraph everyone skims past is the essay: the dialysis unit on Tuesdays, the smell she stopped noticing, the patient who taught her cribbage and then stopped remembering the rules. We rebuilt around it. And one thing is now protected, in writing, so nobody improves it later: the activities list. It is specific and true, and it should not be touched.
October · Before submission · Fictional sample
Re-read the whole file cold, the way a reviewer will. The May cut is paying for itself: the two secondaries it bought are the strongest documents in the file. One activity description rewritten after a program clarified its continuation terms. Submitted in deadline order, earliest first. I told the family what I write here: from tonight the file is out of our hands, and worry is not an action item. Interview practice starts in two weeks.
December · Interview season · Fictional sample
First mock MMI: she argues to win, which reads as coached certainty, the one thing a committee distrusts most in a seventeen-year-old. Three sessions later she thinks out loud and lets the question breathe. That is not an interview trick. It is the habit the next ten years of her training will run on, and it is the part of this year that outlasts the decision letters.
The story
The school list
Interview readiness
Fictionalized record. Not a real student, and no outcome is implied. A real Notebook names the real programs, rates the real file, and re-rates it in writing at every one of these points.
The part no one else includes
It does not end when they get in. The hardest year is the one after.
A BS/MD seat is conditional, and even a regular college start is a hard landing. The first year away is foundational, and it is when a strong high school student meets college, and medicine, for the first time. The roommate situation that is not working. Course selections that have to serve the program's requirements from the first semester. Homesickness nobody budgeted for. The research and clinical doors that open early for students who know to knock. And under all of it, a question a freshman cannot answer alone: is this normal, or is something wrong? It is also the stretch a family can least see into.
So Dean's List does not stop at the acceptance. Through their first semester, I check in with your student every month. Not as their doctor, and not for medical care. As someone who knows them, knows this path, and has watched this exact stretch go sideways for students who looked fine from the outside. The check-ins are practical and personal both: which courses protect the seat, which opportunities are worth reaching for in year one, and whether a hard month is just a hard month or something worth flagging. What it is, and what care it might call for, is not mine to diagnose. Your student knows this is how we work from day one: nothing goes home behind their back. When something seems off, my job is to catch it early, tell you, and connect your student to the right help on their own campus, counseling or student health. I am not their doctor. I keep an eye on how they are doing, I catch the wobble early, and when your family needs to lean in, I am the one who tells you, before a hard semester becomes a lost seat.
It holds no matter how the cycle ends. In a BS/MD program, we protect the GPA, the courses, and the professionalism standards that keep the guaranteed seat. At a regular college as a premed, we build the foundation that keeps medicine wide open. The first semester is included either way, whether or not the BS/MD seat comes through, because the student who lands on the traditional route needs that first semester every bit as much. Your student has a physician in their corner through the stretch that decides the most, and you have someone whose whole job is to tell you the truth about how it is going. If your family wants me alongside them past that first semester, semester by semester toward the white coat, that is The Private Dean, $3,000 per semester, and we design it together.
I spent years as an assistant dean sitting across from students in the semester where the wobble had already become the fall. Every item on this list is something I learned there, generalized, with the names long gone. The monthly check-ins exist to catch these early:
- Burnout that presents as laziness, weeks before the grades show it.
- A course load that fits the college but breaks the program's continuation terms.
- Motivation that dips once the long-chased goal is reached. Common, survivable, and much cheaper when it is named early.
- The research and clinical doors that open in year one and close unknocked.
- The professionalism flag no freshman recognizes as one: the missed form, the skipped required session, logged in a file they never see.
I built the first semester into Dean's List because, if this were my own child, that is the stretch I would not leave uncovered.
From families and students I advised
What it was like to work together.
These are families I have worked with through Bridge2MD, and students I advised in my years as an Assistant Dean.
“Dr. Rory has been extremely helpful. Our daughter was applying to multiple BS/MD programs, and Dr. Rory was very knowledgeable on program specifics, deadlines, and provided valuable insights throughout the entire process.”
“We wanted clear guidance for the BS/MD route and a better understanding of how to prepare for a competitive process. I would tell another parent that this guidance is very helpful if their child is serious about the BS/MD path. It gives the family direction, accountability, and more confidence during a stressful process. Dr. Rory is very helpful, trustworthy and understanding.”
“Dr. Merritt gave our student a compass to follow.”
“Thank you for always being someone the students could go to for anything. I never felt anything less than fully listened to and understood, and the emails checking in with your advisees always made me feel supported.”
“From advice about courses to recommendations for programs, you encouraged exploration and gave me the freedom to try many different courses and extracurriculars, and to regain my motivation.”
“I could not have asked for a better advisor. You encouraged me to seek opportunities that catered to my passion, and your recommendations helped me secure my dream internship.”
This is for one kind of family, and not for several others.
Dean's List is for a student who is genuinely competitive for BS/MD, and a family that wants one person, the right person, carrying the cycle with them. It is for juniors and seniors both. A junior gets the full arc, entering around junior spring and working through submission and the year after. A rising senior gets the compressed cycle, summer through the decision and the first semester after, and it is built for exactly what a senior needs: flawless execution of the application they can still shape, not a year of profile-building they have already done. Both footings put the same physician in your student's corner. If your student is younger than a rising junior, there is nothing here to buy yet: the free library and the prep guide are the right place, and 11th grade is when this door opens.
It is not for:
- A student who is not yet competitive. The traditional path to medicine may be wide open, and Dean's List is simply not built for that path.
- A family looking for a guarantee of admission. I do not sell those, and anyone who does is not telling you the truth.
- A family that wants a large firm, a roster of associates, and a platform login. That is a different kind of help, and there are firms that do it well.
- A family that wants endless meetings. We do the opposite, on purpose.
- General college advising, or SAT and ACT prep. Dean's List is BS/MD specialist work, not everything-advising.
If your student is not ready, I will tell you, and I will point you to what comes first. You are not paying me to be told yes.
Before you ask
Questions I expect parents to ask me.
Will you write my child's essays?
No, and you should walk away from anyone who will. I architect, I challenge, and I edit judgment, and the sentences stay the student's. A committee can hear a forty-five-year-old inside a seventeen-year-old's essay, and it costs the file more than a rough sentence ever would.
What happens when we disagree with one of your calls?
We talk it through with the reasoning in the open, and then you decide. It is your family. My recommendation goes in the Notebook in writing either way, so a year later there is no fog about who called what. You are hiring my judgment, not surrendering yours.
How much of this is you, and how much is your assistant?
Every judgment is mine: every strategy call, every read-through of every draft, every meeting. My assistant keeps the calendar and the action items, and nothing else.
What are you like when the news is bad?
Fast and direct. You hear it from me the same week, with what we do next attached. Bad news that arrives late is the only kind that costs a family anything.
Why not one of the big firms?
You will find firms that advertise a ninety-eight percent acceptance rate and ten thousand students served. Read those numbers closely, and ask what the denominator is. Qualified students only? A top-three result? Success measured only after the interview? And the person whose credential drew you in is rarely the person you get: you are assigned an associate. With Dean's List the person who does the work is me, start to finish: a physician and former Assistant Dean in a BS/MD program who went through one himself.
How does it work, and how do we spend the time?
It starts with one conversation about fit, at no charge, so we both know this is right before either of us commits. Then the work runs in three stretches. The build, spring into summer: the diagnostic, the school list, and the essays, meeting with the student every other week. The crunch, fall: submission, every piece read before it goes out, still every other week or closer. The wait and decide, winter into spring: interview practice, then weighing the offers, monthly as the pace eases. A quarterly family meeting keeps parents oriented throughout, and the first semester after admission adds a monthly check-in. Every meeting has a job and moves the application forward. My assistant sits in to capture action items, and the schedule bends to your family, including religious observances.
The investment
Dean's List is $15,000 for the full cycle, and the first semester after.
Full junior cycle: $15,000. Enter around junior spring, the whole arc through submission, decision, and the first semester after.
Compressed rising-senior cycle: $12,000. Summer through decision and the first semester after. Execution, not formation.
Price it against the decisions, not the meetings. A cycle holds roughly a dozen calls that cannot be redone: the list, the story, which drafts ride, Early Decision or not, what to do with the offer. Those are what a year costs to get wrong, and they are what this fee puts a physician on. The other thing a family buys is easier to name than most pages admit: you sleep, because none of those calls is yours to make alone anymore.
The most comprehensive BS/MD advising packages run well into five figures, staffed by former admissions officers and rotating associates, and the top general-admissions firms charge more still. And the packages I have seen end at the acceptance. Dean's List is $15,000: a former Assistant Dean, entirely yours, for the whole cycle and the first semester after admission, priced inside the same range the firms charge for a roster and a login that go silent the day your child gets in. For a rising senior applying this fall, the compressed senior cycle is $12,000, about eighty percent of the full year, since the junior build window has passed and the work is execution rather than formation. The rate you start at is locked, and it holds for any continued work with me, through graduation.
Already done a Second Opinion? Its fee is credited in full toward Dean's List, so nothing you have already spent on a look at the file is lost.
How to start
I'm taking families for this cycle.
No waitlist, no hoop. Tell me where your student is and why now, and we will set up a conversation, no charge, so we both know whether this is the right fit before either of us commits to a year. Juniors and rising seniors both: tell me which, and I will tell you honestly whether the full cycle or the compressed senior cycle is the right shape for your student.
Got it.
Thank you. I read every note myself, and I will reach out the same day whenever I can, always within 48 hours. No pressure, and no obligation.
Before you decide.
Questions first? Email rorymerritt@bridge2md.com
A physician in your corner, the whole way in, and the first semester after.
$15,000, the whole cycle and the first semester after. I'm taking families for this cycle.
My promise is on the work, not the result. No advisor can promise a BS/MD admission, and I never will. Before we commit to a year together, we talk it through, and if this is not the right path for your student, I tell you before either of us begins. Once we begin, you are not locked in: the plan runs month to month, only while we are working together, so you never owe for work we have not done.
All the ways we work together → The Match → See Where You Stand, free →
Questions before you decide? Email rorymerritt@bridge2md.com