Med School Confidential

by Robert H Miller

  Before we look at each of these application steps in detail, let’s review some helpful resources. The AAMC Web site (www.aamc.org) is an excellent source of information. It provides a helpful array of tools and tables to help you to assess your strengths and weaknesses as a candidate (e.g., how does my undergraduate GPA stack up nationally, or at a particular school?) and also allows you to search and compare the attributes of every program in the country (e.g., how innovative is the curriculum at my favorite school?). Spend some time exploring this Web site and get familiar with it. As you march through the application process, you’ll find it can be a very useful resource.

  As noted a couple of chapters ago, the AAMC also produces a book called the Medical School Admission Requirements (MSAR). This is a fairly comprehensive collection of the general requirements for medical school admission as well as all the individual, school-specific requirements, which will be very helpful to you in preparing your spreadsheet of individual application requirements and helping you stay organized. Purchase a copy, or at least consult a copy in any college library, career services office, or premed office. You can order your copy from the AAMC’s Web site (www.aamc.org/medicalschools.htm).

  Finally, there is a wealth of information available to you on the Internet. Helpful hints, application tips, and information about various medical schools and their cultures can be found on e-mail subscription lists, and in chat rooms and blogs. One particularly helpful and stable site is the Student Doctor Network (www.studentdoctor.net). Here, you will find a wide array of forums detailing everything from premed classes to choosing your residency. Web sites like these attract an online community of would-be physicians and provide a welcome opportunity to share ideas, ask questions, learn from each other’s misadventures, or just plain commiserate.

  The AMCAS universal application

  As discussed above, the first step in the medical-school application process is the filing of the initial AMCAS universal application. A minority of schools do not subscribe to this system and rely only on their own applications for admission, but since you’ll likely be applying to several schools, chances are very good you’ll be filling out an AMCAS application.

  The AMCAS universal application is comprised of the following sections:

  Biographical Information: All your basic identifying information, including your full legal name, your Social Security number, your contact information, and so forth.

  Postsecondary Experiences: Essentially your resume of extracurricular and postundergraduate activities. You’re allowed a maximum of fifteen, so you may have to condense your experiences into groups.

  Scholastic Information: You will need to obtain official transcripts from your undergrad and premed classes and painstakingly fill out the tables of classes and grades. The AAMC Web site will help you calculate a cumulative GPA. Be forewarned—the AAMC will compare the official transcripts from your schools with the data you enter into the course/grade tables, so don’t exaggerate!

  Standardized Tests: Your MCAT scores will be automatically reported to the AAMC. If you wish to attach additional scores from other standardized tests, like the SAT, you can do so in this section.

  Personal Statement/Essay: A fairly open-ended one-page essay in which you are asked to explain your impetus for applying to medical school.

  Spend some time on the AMCAS Web site getting the lay of the land. Register for a user name and password, and become familiar with the site, its tools, and its resources. Once you get a sense of the scope and type of information the primary application asks for, begin collecting the required materials. The goal here is not to start filling out the application immediately but to start gathering the necessary supporting materials and develop a sense of how your credentials stack up.

  Make a file for your “Academic Record,” and request the requisite number of official transcripts of your undergraduate work. If you completed your premed requirements after college, you’ll need to provide a separate official transcript documenting those classes, and once again you will need to order the requisite number of copies in advance. Be forewarned: during the busy admissions season, it can take up to eight weeks to receive your official transcripts, so don’t procrastinate on this task!

  Your MCAT score reports also go in this file for safekeeping.

  Make a separate file for “Honors, Awards, and Achievements,” and get actual records of any awards and honors you’ve received so that when you describe them on your application you’ll have specific descriptions and dates of the awards.

  Finally, make a file of “Relevant Experiences,” and list and summarize jobs, volunteer positions, and any and all experiences you’ve had that you feel contribute to your interest in medicine or to your general professional experience and persona. This can be everything from summer jobs as a camp counselor, in which you demonstrated leadership skills, to a bench-top research project you helped out on in college. When in doubt, be inclusive here.

  My postbac advisor said that a good application was a composite of three things: academic performance (GPA plus MCAT), community service, and research experience. Different schools place different weight on each of the three, but they form the foundation of an application. Any deficit in one (in my case, research experience) should be balanced by a stand-out performance in another. This set of advice is a simplistic but invaluable approach to putting together your application, and I cannot emphasize enough how many times I have seen people ignore this advice to their detriment. The important follow-through about this advice, however, is to realize that while it is your application that gets you the interview, it is the interview that gets you your acceptance.

  —Pete

  A SELF-ASSESSMENT OF THE STRENGTH OF YOUR CREDENTIALS

  Once you’ve surveyed the application landscape and gathered up the necessary information, it’s time to take stock of where you are and determine how best to compile that information into a competitive application. There is, of course, no one perfect way to formulate a med-school application. There are, however, several key components that an admissions officer will be looking for. These include demonstrated scholastic aptitude, intellectual curiosity and drive, maturity and responsibility, integrity and the courage to act with that integrity, a desire to serve, and a sincere interest in health care or the practice of medicine.

  Knowing this, do a general self-assessment and consider how your experiences will address these key points. If you find gaps or areas that need shoring up, doing this assessment early on will give you the opportunity to seek ways to round out your application. While you should never engage in an activity simply to pad your med-school application, it does make sense to identify gaps in your application and to find ways to optimize these areas. Let’s break out these components individually and examine what roles they play in your evolving application to medical school.

  Scholastic fitness

  Simply put, do you have the intellectual aptitude to meet the demands of the grueling med-school curriculum? Your application should accent academic experiences that required discipline, individualized research, or concentrated study and the mastering of difficult material. Do not limit yourself to experiences in the sciences. If you published your senior thesis examining the biblical implications of Melville’s Moby Dick, that discussion goes here. Address any deficiencies head-on. Demonstrate that now, armed with maturity and a passion for medicine, you have what it takes to excel academically. If specific classes are a serious blot on your record, consider retaking one or two of them to prove you can handle the material.

  Intellectual drive and curiosity

  The premed curriculum has the capacity to turn people into drones. You go through the sequence of large premed courses as a well-orchestrated herd. Most of these classes leave little room for expressing individuality. Thus, it becomes important to demonstrate that you have an inherent intellectual curiosity and can pursue it independently.

  Did you develop a research project with a faculty m
entor and gain valuable hands-on research experience? Maybe you took time off to travel a part of the world to pursue a particular interest. Perhaps you spent some time teaching, writing, mastering an art, or playing music. Look to highlight specific occasions where you demonstrated a focused, individualized intellectual effort and discuss how the experience helped you grow.

  Maturity and responsibility

  Maturity and responsibility are obviously critical attributes of the successful med-school candidate. The role of physician is a weighty one. You will frequently be faced with major life-and-death decisions and trusted with the most sensitive details of people’s lives. You must demonstrate not just that you’ve held positions of responsibility before but that you’ve carried off those responsibilities admirably. If your record is weak in this area, look for opportunities to get involved in leadership—take on a new responsibility at work, coach a team, spend some time teaching, or get involved with a community or professional organization or committee. As always, let your interests and passions drive you, but as you accomplish things, allow them to take their proper place in your application.

  Integrity and ethical conduct

  Ethical conduct as a scholar, a professional, and an individual is another essential quality for the physician. For most applicants, these attributes will be implied and need not be specifically demonstrated in your application. If you have had lapses or errors in judgment that will be revealed in your application, however, it is vitally important to address these circumstances head-on. Any sort of criminal record, especially one involving substance abuse, will be a matter of serious concern to admissions committees. You will need to prove that those issues are in your past and are no longer a problem for you. A letter of explanation accompanying your application is appropriate in these circumstances. If there are other personal or academic issues in your past, like other legal problems or expulsions for cheating, it would also be wise to discuss strategies for approaching these concerns with your premed advisor early on in the process.

  Desire to serve

  Medicine is an inherently service-oriented profession. At some fundamental level, all physicians are driven by a desire to help their patients, often setting aside their own needs to focus on their patients’ needs. As such, demonstrating a dedication to public service is an important aspect of your application. If you haven’t already done so, find a local hospital, rescue service, nursing home, or doctor’s office and get involved. Travel to an underserved area and help out in a relief mission. Work at the local soup kitchen. Pick something you think you will enjoy. Try to develop a longer-term relationship with an organization that will enable you to develop relationships, demonstrate commitment, and develop some skills in a clinical setting.

  Sincere interest in health care

  Finally, a long-standing and profound interest in medicine is easy to demonstrate—if, that is, you’ve had a long-standing interest in medicine.

  “Uh-oh,” you say. “I just realized two months ago that this is what I want to do with my life—how am I supposed to pretend I’ve always wanted to be a doctor?”

  You can’t. And you shouldn’t.

  But you can reflect on the experiences you’ve had and define how they led you to your discovery of a passion for medicine. You can demonstrate that you’ve really explored and considered your decision to pursue medicine and that you are not acting on a whim. Spend time shadowing a physician, talk to other medical students about their experiences, or volunteer in a clinic, and then find some meaningful way to tie those experiences to your newfound interest in pursuing medicine. Remember that if your application lacks a clear, demonstrated interest in health care or medicine, you will need to convince an admissions committee, which is looking at thousands of other applicants who can demonstrate this commitment, that they should choose you.

  CREATE A TIMELINE AND A MASTER TASK LIST

  Staying organized and on top of your application requirements and deadlines is essential to the success of your application process. Applications are typically due in October or November of the year prior to matriculation. But there’s a catch. Schools choose individually whether or not they wish to use the AMCAS universal application as an initial screen. Schools that do will likely await your finalized application to decide whether or not you qualify for a secondary application. Conversely, schools that do not use AMCAS as a screen may respond to the initial biographic data they receive from AMCAS (i.e., your name and address) by sending you a secondary application immediately, even before your AMCAS application is completed. This means two things. First, any and all material you put online for the universal application should be in final form. Second, you should get your AMCAS application up and running as early as possible to get your name into the applicant pool and facilitate your receipt of secondary applications early in the process.

  A good benchmark is to try to get your AMCAS application online by mid-to-late August of your application year. This will give you time to review and complete your secondary applications and be competitive for the fall/winter interview season. The longer you wait, the bigger the applicant pool and the suffer the competition.

  So, let’s work backward from that date.

  About a year prior to that, you should begin to scrutinize the AMCAS application and gather your materials. This means if you’re still an undergraduate, you should begin the preliminaries of your medschool application process in the fall of junior year. Spend the fall and winter of your junior year doing a realistic self-assessment, listing and examining your application strengths and weakness, and developing a plan to smooth the edges and fill in the gaps. Make sure you meet the fall deadlines for application to the April MCAT if you haven’t already taken it (refer to chapter 4 for details about the MCAT). In early spring, meet with your premed advisor about your application. By midspring start asking for your letters of recommendation. By June you should begin drafting your personal statement for the AMCAS application. All your letters of recommendation should be received by your college’s premed committee by the end of July, and you should be actively creating your application online. Aim to complete your AMCAS application by mid-to-late August. The deadline is October 1.

  Let’s look more closely at each of these application milestones.

  Getting organized

  In the fall prior to your intended application season, you should start getting organized. Peruse the AAMC and AMCAS Web sites. Download the application materials and get familiar with them. Complete the self-assessment as outlined above, and make a list of the areas where you feel strongest and the areas where you feel your application could use some shoring up. Actively seek opportunities and experiences that can address these needs. Starting early gives you a full year to remedy any obvious weaknesses.

  How to use your premed advisor

  The next step is to meet with your premed advisor. If you’re doing your premed studies as a postbac, you may elect to use your advisor at your original undergraduate institution or the advisor at the school where you’ve done your most recent course work. Pick the person who will have the most insight into your current academic abilities and who is likely to carry the most weight with an admissions committee.

  Either way, in March of your application year, take your folders of application materials with you and sit down with your advisor to discuss your application. Lay out your record and candidly discuss your strengths and weaknesses. Develop a plan to remedy any remaining identified deficiencies. Discuss which of your experiences stand out and merit emphasis in your application. Most important, ask for a letter of recommendation from your premed advisor. While you may barely know this person, and thus a letter from him or her may seem to carry limited value, most schools either look for or require a letter from the premed advisor or committee at your college or university. While the letter may not provide the most intimate, personal spin on your candidacy, the advisor or committee will be able to objectively comment on your performance in your premed class
work relative to your peers.

  The categorical rank your premed advisor gives to your application will provide admissions committees with a somewhat objective measure of your undergrad and premed successes. In addition, most premed advisors or committees require that all your letters of recommendation be sent directly to them so that they can review and summarize your other recommenders’ comments in their letter. They then collate the stack of letters, lead with their own letter, and send the package off to your selected schools.

  Given the influence that your premed advisor will have in the process, the importance of getting to know this person on a personal level cannot be overstated. People generally go the extra mile to help people they know and like. In the highly competitive process of med-school admissions, every incremental advantage helps . . . and this is one that a lot of applicants will overlook.

  Don’t be one of them.

  Spring of your junior year is also a good time to begin researching which schools you should apply to. In this age of online resources, this task has never been easier. Use the AAMC Web site and the various med-school home pages to evaluate schools, learn which schools use which teaching formats, and generate ideas about which schools interest you. During your meeting with your premed advisor, ask for some advice on schools you should consider, given your academic record and interests. In many cases, your premed advisor will have particular insight about, and may recommend, specific schools that look favorably on graduates from your undergraduate institution.