For Jielu Yu, a first-generation and first-year medical student, the path to med school took a circuitous route, sidelined by the COVID pandemic.

Starting college when the pandemic hit meant Yu had to delay pre-med shadowing opportunities until it was safe to do so in her junior year, when she would also have been applying to med school and studying for the MCAT.

“I wasn’t really sure if I was able to deal with the uncertainty and the kind of sacrifices I would have to make to be a doctor and turn that career into a lifestyle.”

So she took a 2-year gap to test the corporate market as a management consultant and social impact associate for a tech company. Meanwhile, she also volunteered in a San Francisco emergency department near where she lived and worked.

Those work experiences solidified her commitment to equity and social impact in medicine and gave her the confidence to believe she could handle a strenuous medical career. “And so that’s why I went back onto the pre-med path and applied to schools and took the MCAT.”

Yu, now enrolled at UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts, is among the new matriculants helping to drive increased enrollment in the 2025-2026 academic year. First-time applicants comprised nearly 76% of all medical school applicants this year, close to an 8% increase, according to the latest enrollment figures released recently by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), which represents MD-granting medical schools.

The total number of medical school applicants rose about 5%, reversing a 3-year decline. Besides a 1-year increase during the pandemic, in the 2021-2022 academic year, this was the largest gain in 10 years, AAMC reported. Total enrollment had been inching up in recent years, surpassing 100,000 students in the current academic year despite previous declines in applications.

The enrollment figures suggest a rebound from COVID-era declines in applications, according to Geoffrey Young, PhD, AAMC’s senior director for the Transforming the Health Care Workforce Unit.

“We think this may still be influenced by post-COVID effects in education. Although we don’t have a definitive explanation, the increase may signal a return to a more stable level of medical school applications.”

The American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine, which represents DO-granting medical schools, has also seen increased applications , according to its recent enrollment report. Both reports help paint a picture of renewed interest in medicine, according to Bryan Carmody, MD, who regularly blogs about medical education.

“If you look at long-term historical trends, medical school application numbers behave like a counter-cyclical asset with a delay, since it takes several years for applicants to make career decisions, complete prerequisites, take the MCAT, and so on,” Carmody said.

“Obviously, there are some applicants who only ever wanted to be a doctor, but it is empirically true that periods of economic uncertainty lead to more applicants seeking a stable career in medicine. So I think we should wonder how much this rebound represents optimism about medicine itself or skepticism about the alternatives.”

Among the trends AAMC noted, women continue a 7-year pattern as the majority of applicants, matriculants, and total enrollment. This year, female matriculants rose about 1%, the largest increase in 4 years since 2021-2022.

Also, women comprised about 57% of applicants, 55% of matriculants, and the same ratio of total enrollment. But for the third year in a row, men saw larger increases in matriculants than women.

“So what we have been finding was that even prior to COVID, overall, that women were outpacing men in terms of applications to medical school, and the clearest reason for that may be just the fact that women have outpaced men in college the enrollment,” Young said.

At Yu’s med school, UMass, 59% of new applicants were women and 66% of matriculants, according to AAMC’s enrollment records.

Yu said she applied last year because she was fearful that if she didn’t, there would be a cap on federal student loans she needed to pay for medical school. Her med school class was grandfathered into prior federal borrowing limits with access to federal student loans to cover their full cost of attendance, she added.

She also told Medscape Medical News that the medical schools that accepted her would have cost at least $450,000 for the 4 years.

She pays for med school with student loans and savings from earnings during her gap years.

Yu is looking forward to a future medical career that will involve technological advances, such as artificial intelligence (AI). “I feel like it’s such an exciting time right now with AI.” She believes it will help reduce her administrative workload, allowing her to focus on patients.

“I want to have this degree to show my subject matter expertise in the clinical work, and I’m really hoping to be able, in the future, to make a product or lead initiatives that marry the area of technology into healthcare and increasing health equity in that way.”

Roni Robbins is a freelance journalist and former editor for Medscape Business of Medicine. She’s also a freelance health reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Her writing has appeared in WebMD, HuffPost, Forbes, New York Daily News, BioPharma Dive, MNN, Adweek, Healthline, and others. She’s also the author of the multi-award-winning Hands of Gold: One Man’s Quest to Find the Silver Lining in Misfortune.