Hello! I meant to reply to your message a few weeks ago, but I got super busy with my preparation for the interview. I sincerely wanted to thank you for giving me your perspective of things... I really appreciated how you wrote about your personal experience graduating, worried about the job market and potentially living in your parents' basement forever... this sounds scarily close to my situation haha. I have a pre-med degree which is quite useless by itself unless you're doing a grad-school like medicine. Here in Canada these med school admission processes are absolutely brutal with the limited number of spots and the difficult interview processes, and applying multiple cycles for medical school is literally the norm here (it really shouldn't be imo). I just had my interview this morning and unfortunately I absolutely bombed it. Like, my stutter isn't very bad in day-to-day life but today I almost became dysfunctional lmao. It was probably the significant weight I attached to this very moment which paralyzed me. But to be fair, though, I'm sure every other student was just as nervous as I was. It's just that their anxiety doesn't really manifest in the same ways that ours does regarding locked up vocal cords. As I was blocking and stuttering so severely I could literally feel the interviewers looking upon me with pity hahaha. Unfortunately I couldn't implement the "pragmatist" approach of admitting my stutter to them in the moment. Maybe it's because I haven't yet learned to overcome the shame or stigma of having a stutter. Maybe this can be a personal project I work on during my (very) likely gap year. It does suck knowing the number of classes I skipped, the assignments I asked for extensions, and the many many hours I put into preparing for this interview in the last 30 days. All for it to blow up because I can't talk. Regardless, I just thought I'd give an update, especially to any people viewing this in the future. Not to discourage folks, just to show that life isn't always fair. Life goes on. Maybe I'll try reapplying for one more cycle here in Canada before I cut my losses, using your approach of expecting a failure and even looking forward to overcoming it. I do fear you're a bit more of an optimist than I am, though, lol. Thanks so much for your initial response. It truly motivated me these past few weeks despite my disappointing results.