Hi everyone,
I am nervous and anxious about sharing my story and asking for any help, but here it goes.
My name is Sam and I currently feel hopeless and lost in the journey to get into medical school. So much so that I have been pushing off applying for medical school for the past 2-3 years. Before proceeding, let me put in my timeline
2009-2013 Undergraduate (GPA 3.4, sGPA 3.3)
2014-2015 Post-baccalaureate ( sGPA 3.7)
2015-2016 EMT classes and ended up working as a scribe instead
2016-now Working as a scribe, then as a medical scribe/MA at an urgent care
Since taking the EMT classes, I have taken the MCAT twice ( 498 1st MCAT, canceled the second time) and I feel that the 5 gap years have now placed me in a more difficult position to get into medical school. Now, I am not sure if I need to retake prerequisite classes over again. To make things worse, I have been told by my PCP that I might have ADHD and I am scheduled for an assessment ( which explains a lot of my shortcoming)
So my question is what I need to do get back on track to be a great applicant. Any help would be great.
Hi Sam,
Thanks for sharing your story.
You’ve improved your GPA quite a bit through the post-bacc, I would not worry about GPA too much. You also have good clinical experience.
I believe your biggest hurdle might be the MCAT. You should make sure you prepare well for it the second time around. This may involve working less hours to make sure the MCAT is your top priority for that given time period. A prep course may help if you need structure. Im not sure if you plan on applying to DO programs or just MD but DO programs have lower average MCAT scores for matriculants than MD. It may be something to consider. Either way a higher MCAT score will open more doors for you.
Now some schools do have expiration dates on their prerequisite classes, many don’t. You have to do some research to find out if the schools you are interested in accept older prerequisites. For some schools pre-reqs can’t be older than five years, for some it’s ten. So even if you have ADHD, it doesn’t mean you cannot succeed in getting into med school. It can potentially be something you can talk about at an interview for example, so it’s not necessarily a bad thing as long as you can overcome it.
Other than that, start looking into physician shadowing and other extracurricular activities you might enjoy doing. Overall, if you can score a little higher on the MCAT and have other activities than can support your character that you really enjoy doing, I think you will have a good application. Hope this helps, good luck!
Hello Sam,
I’m in a bit of a similar situation as you and I agree with Melissa; I think your postbacc GPA looks great and puts you in a better position academically. I recommend calling the med schools you are interested in and asking them about whether they have a time frame for when pre-reqs expire. At this point continuing your healthcare work and getting a strong MCAT score would be best.
All the best,
Frederick