Contributor program
Contributor Terms
Last updated October 8, 2026. These terms apply when you submit an interview through DocStory’s contribute form. We’ve written them in plain language; if anything is unclear, ask us before you submit.
1. Who can contribute
- You’re currently enrolled at a U.S. MD or DO school, in your first through fourth year, and haven’t graduated.
- You have an active school email address ending in .edu that you can receive mail at.
- You’re submitting your own interview, written by you, about your own experience.
2. What you write
- Be truthful. Say when you’re passing on something classmates told you rather than something you saw yourself.
- Never include patient information or anything that could identify a patient, including combinations of dates, places, and conditions.
- Don’t include confidential school information, exam content, or private details about classmates, faculty, or staff.
- Criticism is welcome when it’s honest and specific. Don’t make false statements of fact about people.
3. Verification and approval
Before we publish anything, we email the school address you gave us. The email comes from a DocStory email address, includes your reference number (it starts with “DS-”), and contains your edited interview.
To verify, reply from that school address within 14 days to confirm the interview is yours and approve the edits, or tell us what to change. If your interview is eligible for payment, your reply is also where you choose how you’d like to be paid: tell us whether you prefer PayPal or Venmo, and the username or email address to send it to. If we can’t verify you, we won’t publish your interview or pay for it. We’ll never ask for passwords, bank details, or payment to you through any other channel.
4. Editing
We edit for format, length, spelling, and clarity, and we may leave out answers that are off-topic or that break section 2. We don’t change what you meant. Nothing is published until you approve the final version.
5. Quality standard
Whether an interview is ready to publish is at DocStory’s discretion. As a guide, we look for interviews of similar caliber to the typical interview already on DocStory: specific, first-hand answers with enough detail to genuinely help an applicant.
We make every effort to accept and pay for every good-faith submission. If an interview falls short, we’ll usually ask you to expand or add detail to specific answers rather than decline it. If it still doesn’t meet the standard after revision, we may decline it, and declined interviews aren’t paid.
6. Permission to publish
You keep ownership of what you write. By submitting, you give DocStory a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, ongoing permission to publish, display, edit as described above, and share your interview (including short excerpts and quotes) on DocStory and in DocStory’s own promotion, with the credit you chose: full name, first name, or anonymous.
Because it’s non-exclusive, you’re free to share your own story elsewhere too.
7. Payment
- We pay $50 for each interview that is verified, approved, and published, within 7 days of publication, by PayPal or Venmo.
- You choose your payment method in your reply to our verification email (see section 3). We send payment only to the PayPal or Venmo account named in a reply from your verified school address, and we never ask for bank details.
- Payment is limited to one paid interview per person.
- Interviews are paid only for schools with fewer than 5 published DocStory interviews at the time you submit. The form shows whether your school is eligible before you start writing. For schools we don’t yet cover, we confirm eligibility during review.
- We don’t pay for interviews that are withdrawn before publication, can’t be verified, don’t meet the quality standard in section 5 after revision, or aren’t published because they break these terms.
- You’re responsible for any taxes on payments you receive.
- We may change or end the payment program for future submissions at any time. The amount shown when you submit is the amount we’ll pay if your interview is published.
8. Changing or removing your interview
You can ask us to remove your published interview, or switch it to anonymous, at any time by emailing us from your school address. We’ll do it within 7 days. We may remove or decline any interview at our discretion, for example if we learn it breaks these terms.
9. Your information
We collect your name, school email, school, year, graduation year, and any optional details you choose to add. We use them only to verify you, communicate about your interview, and pay you. We never sell them, and we never publish your email. Your name is published only if you choose full-name or first-name credit. Your draft is saved only in your own browser until you submit.
10. Changes to these terms
If we update these terms, we’ll change the date at the top. The version in place when you submitted applies to your interview.