@Asoles111, you are not at any disadvantage. It’s a natural part of the college admissions process to have a waitlist. There are x number of student spots, y number of interview slots. If someone is given an interview and turns it down they still have to fill that spot, so it goes to the person who is at the top of the numbered waitlist and working their way down. Same when you apply for residency, in terms of a waitlist, etc. You are treated like everyone else, and yes, in this thread even, there are people who were on the waitlist and made it into the program after being given the chance to interview. So for all intents and purposes, you are on a clean footing with everyone else who received an interview back in December. You won’t be docked points in the process because you were on the waitlist at one time. It’s not a punitive thing.
I would not shadow at all at this point. Your application has already been processed. You wouldn’t gain anything on the admissions front, although you might gain in terms of knowing whether becoming a physician (vs. some other type of healthcare professional) is truly right for you. You can see the previous posts in the thread that I’ve written regarding the interview which is now in MMI format and not the traditional interview format.
I don’t think just “prestige” by itself is a problem, in terms of name for UMKC - I think that gets confused on this thread a lot by those who rush to defend, as if we’re comparing UMKC to Harvard (none of us are doing that and it’s a very extreme comparison at that). What kind of goes with so-called “prestige” is more high-powered institutions with networking, opportunities to meet big academic people in specialties who can write you great letters, research opportunities available on site that help when it comes to top-tier programs as a well as strong middle tier programs, etc. It’s more an issue of opportunities and resources available at that institution when it comes to helping students in the residency match. There are many great, well-funded (thus low student tuition), state public medical schools across the nation that have wonderful opportunities for their medical students to expand their CVs to do very well in the residency match. UMKC doesn’t really fit into this category for several reasons which have been previously discussed.
But you are correct, it very much depends on what your specialty goals are, keeping in mind that this is very likely to change by the time you graduate from medical school. If you’re interested in a surgical subspecialty like Pediatric Surgery (which is a fellowship after General Surgery), then yes, you would be at a disadvantage coming from UMKC whose strength isn’t in surgery and doesn’t have many residencies/fellowships in surgical specialties. Pediatric Surgery is a very competitive subspecialty fellowship and is with Children’s Mercy Hospital. For Anesthesiology, you would be ok, as UMKC does have an Anesthesiology department, although not really a strong one by itself. But for the purposes of matching into Anesthesiology as a med student, you should be fine.
