Yama is a Medial School and Graduate School Admissions Consultant for Kaplan, Inc. In the past, he has been involved with medical school admissions at the University of California in Irvine, where he interviewed medical school applicants and scrutinized their applications for a number of years dating back to 1998. He also served on the admissions committee of the combined MD/PhD program. Throughout the years, he has provided consultation to numerous applicants, the vast majority of whom gained acceptance to medical school, many to top-ranked medical schools across the country. Yama's consulting abilities helped him receive Kaplan's "Premed Consultant of the Year" Award for the 2005-2006 academic years.
Yama completed a combined dual-degree (MD and PhD) program known as the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) at the University of California in Irvine in 2006, and is currently a resident physician at UCLA Medical Center. Prior to his medical training, he completed a Bachelor of Sciences degree in Psychobiology at UCLA, graduating Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa. He received acceptance to many medical schools, including the top ranked medical school in his region, the University of California at San Francisco. He chose to pursue the combined MD and PhD program at the University of California at Irvine, where he received a National Institutes of Health fully-funded fellowship and stipend for the duration of the dual-degree program. During the course of his MSTP studies, Yama was awarded many honors, awards, and research grants. He traveled and presented his research at national and international scientific conferences, and achieved various publications in scientific journals. During his applications to medical school as well as residency, he was invited to interview at top institutions across the country, including Stanford, UCSF, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, Cornell and other top programs. However, with humility, he also visited many middle and lower tier medical school programs. This provides a unique perspective for him as a consultant. Moreover, because of the long duration of the M.D. /PhD. curriculum, all of the traditional M.D. curriculum classmates with whom he started medical school have gone on to complete their residencies and/or fellowships at various hospitals across the country. As he keeps in touch with his classmates, he has the unique perspective that spans the time from applying to medical school, to completing residency and fellowship, to becoming a board-certified attending physician or surgeon. This is important because the medical school one attends will have an impact on one's long-term goals when one is choosing a subspecialty of medicine or surgery many years later. As your consultant, Yama will use all of this experience to help you succeed not only in gaining acceptance to the best medical school, but also in reaching your long-term ambitions in medicine.