Yuki on Getting into Medical School

What I am Doing...

This is my concise guide, largely adapted from personal experience. Take it or leave it, and if you take it, please do so with a grain of salt. This is how I experienced the process and is dependent upon time, location, and personal idiosyncrasies. If you want to know how my experience went and wish to take some pointers, have at the free advice!

First Ingredient: Soul-Searching

This absolutely cannot be stressed enough. Medicine is a serious career truly meant for those called to it. You might not want to sacrifice countless hours, $100,000s, free-time, and 8+ years of schooling to be a healer. Research other areas of medicine first, from EMT/Paramedic work to mid-level medical personnel like Nurse Practitioners and Physician's Assistants. Anything from phlebotomist, respiratory therapist, and nurse (RN) are great careers that involve plenty of care-giving and feel-good moments. They are all greatly respectable careers with as much validity as any physician.

Think it through and through. If you look hard and find that you want to be the physician after all, then you should be ready to go for medical school. The M.D. or D.O. degree is for those willing to dedicate their entire lives to the study and practice of modern medicine at its finest form. The health-care industry is a multi-billion dollar industry that is growing rapidly; an exciting future awaits our nation's upcoming doctors, doctors consistently reported to be the best in the world. But beware of rising health-care costs, rising malpractice insurance, litigation, out-sourcing, economic inflation with no compensation adjustment. These are issues to be cognizant of as you consider a career in medicine.

And one more note: please, please, please do not enter medicine for the sake of salary, or to please Mom and Dad. This will hurt you and your future patients. There are many other ways to please the parents and thicken your pocketbook.

Medical School Admissions: Jump Through the Hoops

At a medical school in my state, the numbers do not lie. For 2006-2007: 2,750 applicants to fill 280 spots. This is a very tight bottle-neck that controls who becomes a future-doctor and who does not. State legislature gives medical schools only so much funding (same with residency programs) and so the number of future doctors is limited even though national demand for health-care is skyrocketing. Thus, selectivity is the name of the game when admissions committees pick from the applicant pool.

Thus, when you apply, be ready for stiff competition and work hard to stand out! Remember to keep an eye on the bottom line: To get accepted, you must fulfill a medical school's set of specific criteria (courses, MCAT scores, GPA). Keep your eye on that as you move through your undergraduate career and things will align.

All Right, What is Important?

The tools you need in your toolbox by application-time are easy to manage if you plan carefully. Ideally, you will fill out and send in your AMCAS application between your 3rd and 4th undergraduate year - late summer or early fall. Here's the important stuff, given in first-person as an admissions committee might think:

GPA: The first number that jumps out at us is your basic academic performance. What kind of courses did you take? A 4.0 with easy courses is not as respectable as a 3.75 with hard science courses. Are your trends good? Upward, downward, steady? We separate your science GPA (BCPM) from your non-science GPA and put weight on that, too. In general, we want to see you come at us with a GPA of at least around 3.5 or higher to be considered competitive. We let kids in with GPAs of 3.0 and even lower, but those are very special cases.

The Trick: Work hard and be consistent. Now is the time to prove to yourself (and admissions committees) that you have what it takes to study, memorize, think, and work hard. How you perform in Organic Chemistry, Biology, and upper-level biology classes determines how you will handle medical-school work-loads. Work hard and see where you stand. Don't let a slip-up here and there stop you; this is not the only part of the application!

MCAT: This is the single most accurate measure of all of our applicants. This score is completely independent of individual universities. It is our standardized measure of applicant aptitude. While a 4.0 GPA from one college can be much easier to obtain than a 3.6 at another college, Fred's 28 MCAT tells us that he performed as well as Erin's 28 MCAT.

The Trick: Prepare for this thing! Whether you take a prep-course is up to you. People differ greatly in test-taking ability, but no matter who you are, you can study and get good at this test. Learn the basic material, do practice problems (like crazy), and in general, try to simulate the actual test as much as you can before going in. It's computerized these days so it is a bit more reasonable, but it is still a monster between you and admissions. Take this thing seriously.

Volunteer Experience: Read: Unwritten requirement. Are you serious about medicine? Unless you have spent some time working in a clinical environment, shadowing physicians, witnessing sickness first-hand, and devoting energy and time to health-care, I have no reason to believe you have an earnest desire to get into our school.

The Trick: Volunteer at your local Emergency Department, shadow physicians, volunteer at a clinic, be an EM tech for a year...do this type of stuff and get it on your application!

Research: Not a requirement, but it shows that you have an academic interest beyond that of normal course-work. Doing a summer-program is probably your best option because that leaves other summers open for your volunteer work. Getting published is not required to look good but it can help.

Letters of Recommendation: Solicit these early, like during 3rd year! If you are from a huge school, try to get notable professors (not TAs) and make sure you'll have a great letter written about you. Establish strong relationships with as many professors as you can with these letters in mind (genuine friendships are, of course, allowed!) They will generally be sent in as part of your secondary application (the one you send in once they invite you for an interview, after the first cut).

Personal Essay: This does not make or break you, but do not let it be a red-flag, either. Work on it and craft a unique essay that convinces us that you want to pursue medicine. No clichès, no preachy sermons, no "I want to save the world". Try to stand out to us!

Apply Early!

So you fill out your AMCAS application and get all that stuff in. You send it to 10 schools. Great? Yeah. Just make sure you do it early! This is an easy step that can save you a lot of grief! People do not realize how easy it is to submit early; AMCAS opens up registration early in the summer! You can have your application sent in by July. This gets you at the top of the heap, processed, sent to schools, interviewing, and getting accepted early, before the huge, confusing rush. You do not want to be waiting at the mailbox the next April.

If you do not get in the first time, work on the needy parts of your application and apply again next year with big improvements to show! If this is your dream, follow it!