I wanted to take a brief break from telling my story to discuss medical school admissions and the AMCAS – the standard medical school application. My hope would be someone in the pre-med years, or perhaps earlier, who is planning to apply to medical school would read this and start to think ahead. Applying and successfully matriculating into medical school is no small feat. It’s much more than just getting good grades and taking an exam. Medical schools are performing a more holistic review of students. They want to know that candidates have researched the profession and contemplated the reasoning for their decisions.
Disclaimer: I do sit on the admissions committee where I currently work. There are no trade secrets in this post. My goal is simply to point out some things every student should consider when they are applying to medical school.
The application can be daunting. Trying to distill oneself into a few pieces of paper can be a challenging task. It is not something that any student should do alone. Seek out advice. Ask questions of people who understand the process. Work to create an application that will differentiate you from the thousands of applications that every medical school has to sort through. Because the competition can be so stiff, simple things such as misspellings and bad grammar can lead to the quick rejection of an applicant. Check and double-check the accuracy of your application. Don’t let an overlooked fact or accidental misrepresentation screw up an application.
The personal statement is the first thing many people will read when reviewing an application. Try to write a story that doesn’t just recapitulate the rest of your application. At the very least, answer the question, “Why do you want to be a physician?” Talk about what led you to make that decision. Have something in your application that needs to be addressed? Address it in the personal statement. Write and re-write your statement. Give it to someone to read who will tear it apart and question everything you write. Continue this process until everything is perfect. Remember, it’s often the first thing that people read when reviewing an application, and first impressions are everything!
Don’t be passive about getting letters of recommendation. Talk with the people you ask to write letters. Ask them upfront if they are willing to be supportive and personal. Ask them if they can discuss what characteristics would make you an excellent medical student and, eventually, a competent physician. Where I work, grades are deleted for application reviewers and interviewers. A letter that just says you were ranked X out of X in a large chemistry class is not very helpful to you. If all the letters are like that, it will likely actually hurt the application, not help.
Find a longitudinal research experience and stick with it. A semester washing glasses in a lab doesn’t cut it these days. You don’t have to have publications to get credit for research, but you do need to prove that you have learned and applied the scientific method. Understanding research is fundamental to be able to judge the scientific evidence in the literature. Not everything that finds a way into a journal is good science.
Shadow physicians and get a sense of what the job entails. It’s vital to prove that you have explored the day to day life of a physician. Getting into medical school and then finding out midway that it’s not for you can be a costly mistake. Not sure where to start? Ask your pediatrician or family physician if you can spend a half-day with them. From there, they might be able to help you get in touch with other physicians to shadow. Have a specialty you want to see? Call a local physician’s office and ask to speak with the practice manager. Tell them who you are and what you want to do, and they will often help you out!
Get involved in community service. You can volunteer in the hospital or another medical setting, but you don’t have to. Again, try to make this a longitudinal experience. Four individual experiences that last a day or two are not looked upon as favorably as one experience where lots of time and energy were applied to help others. This is a place where an applicant can differentiate themselves from others. Having a unique experience on your application differentiates you when screeners are looking through a lot of applicants that look very similar or makes the interview memorable when an interviewer is preparing for a presentation to the admissions committee.
Be a leader. Show that you can lead others. Explicitly state where you have leadership experience. Is it a supervisor position at a job? Were you elected to be in charge of a volunteer experience or fraternity/sorority? Make sure to lay out exactly what your experience involved. This is the area where I see applicants struggle the most. It isn’t that most applicants haven’t been leaders. It is more that they just don’t highlight that in the application.
Consider working while in college. Learning how to be an employee, following instructions, and showing up on time are qualities that will make one an excellent medical student and eventually a good co-worker and responsible physician. Medical school is a lot more like a job than like previous educational experiences. Admissions committees (and residencies down the road) really look favorably on an applicant who has prior work experience.
Grades are not everything, but they are part of the holistic review. Don’t have a 4.0 GPA? That’s fine. If you have a lousy grade somewhere, make sure you address it. Maybe there is a reason why. Perhaps you start with a bad grade in a class. Consider dropping that class and re-take when you can focus primarily on that course. Some universities provide a tool that shows all sections of a given course and average grades for each professor. Don’t take the hardest section of organic chemistry if you have that sort of information available to you! Talk with an advisor about course timing. Again, perhaps it is a good idea to schedule a challenging course in the summer so that you can focus on that particular course and grade.
The MCAT, unfortunately, is required. Just like other standardized tests, one of the most important things one can do to be successful is to practice taking the MCAT. Get and utilize question banks. Do as many questions as possible. You probably won’t improve your score by just reading a book. Do the questions. Learn the right answers and read and study explanations. There are only so many concepts that they can test. Many studies show that the only thing that can successfully predict success on a standardized test is the number of practice questions completed.
Make sure to give yourself enough time to not do well on the MCAT. If you aren’t as successful as you would like to be, it can be important to re-take the test. I often see this question asked of applicants who have MCAT scores that don’t necessarily match the rest of their application. “Well, why do they only have one subpar MCAT score on their application?” It’s one thing to have an initial score in the 75th percentile and then improve on a second attempt. It’s quite another just to have one score.
Athlete, those who work or someone who devoted a lot of time to an extracurricular activity? Credit is given for these types of activities, but there are students out there who have competitive applicants, even with one of these activities. An applicant may not need to demonstrate thousands of hours of research if they play a varsity sport at a Division I school, but it is imperative that they still do research. The moral of the story is the holistic review. No one thing gets a person into medical school, but it is essential to present a complete application to be competitive.
It is important to embrace diversity and even a disadvantaged status. We can’t change where or how we grew up. In this setting, ensuring that it is part of the application story is very important. It seems that, at times, people attempt to downplay or leave this out of their application because they feel that they might be looked down upon. This is not the case. Medical schools are actively seeking to include individuals from a broad range of backgrounds into their classes. Just as our patients come from differing backgrounds, so too should our physicians! The comfort that a person might be able to provide their future patients will go a long way to providing them the healthcare they need and desire. In addition, the insight that students from different backgrounds can bring to their education will help their classmates who may not understand how to better care for everyone.
Gap years are important to be able to explain on an application. There is nothing wrong with not going straight from an undergraduate institution to medical school. On the other hand, if time is needed to strengthen an application or perhaps an applicant just has some goal they have set for themselves before entering medical school – waiting for a year or two is not a big problem. It is just important to be able to explain the purpose of that time. If it isn’t addressed in the application, one should be ready to discuss it in an interview. If it isn’t brought up in the interview and the time is not explicitly accounted for, bring it up in an interview. If an admissions committee understands the reasoning behind gap years, they are much more likely to accept them.
There is a lot to consider when preparing the medical school application. It takes years and planning to ensure that all of the experiences necessary are present and completed. In a lot of ways, a person interested in going to medical school needs to start planning as soon as, or very soon after, they start college – or sooner! Having mentors and advisors that understand the process is vital! Seeking out resources at a University is an excellent first step. Developing mentorships with physicians is an important step, as well. Those of us who have been successful in the process are more than happy to help the next generation along!