Do I Have A Shot At Med School?

Hello guys Ive been lurking in this forum for a while and I finally decided to jump in and contribute!



Here are my stats:



Socioeconomic: Black Male 27, single, no kids, spent half of childhood in really rough urban area.



Education: BBA in marketing in 2012 (2.76 GPA). Went back to undergrad for post bac and took about 100+ hours to get a current overall GPA is 3.06 and science GPA of 3.02. Almost all classes were science based.



Job: Certified Ophthalmic Assistant - I work under the supervision of an ophthalmologist by performing visual acuity, assisting in surgery, history taking, tonometry, lensometry, motility, pupil assessment, visual fields, and may perform refraction. (1,000+ hours)



Shadowing: 50+ hours (Pediatric ophthalmologist, glaucoma specialist and retina specialist)



MCAT: Bombed it 3 times… :frowning:



Extracurricular: Mentorship in Underserved community, leader of many organizations on undergraduate campus etc.





I hope that schools see my upward GPA trend. Ive managed to maintain a 3.8 GPA on my last 108 hours. My first 130 or so were pretty crappy…

Welcome to OPM. It sounds like you’d benefit from DO schools’ grade replacement policy, if any of those extra classes you took were repeats especially.



Did you take the old MCAT or new? Why did you bomb it? Common reasons are focusing too much on content without including solid test strategy in your prep, not taking enough practice tests, not going over your practice tests carefully to see what you got wrong and WHY (and fixing it), psyching yourself out, etc. If you’re taking it again, you must change how you prepared, since you have ample evidence what you were doing isn’t working.



I’d also suggest shadowing some doctors outside of eye specialties. Everyone has a weak spot on their application. With your lower GPA and MCAT scores, if those are the weak spots, you want everything else to be exceptional, or as exceptional as possible. That means solid shadowing, good clinical experience and non-clinical volunteering, plus great LORs.



This site is filled with people who started in a worse position than you and are doctors now, so there’s always a shot. You just need to plot out your plan and refuse to slack off on the benchmarks you need to hit to be successful.

Thank you Talulah Philange for your warm welcome. I am currently reevaluating my MCAT strategy. I have so many credits that grade replacements don’t really help too much. Im currently taking sociology, statistics and abnormal physiology because those were weak areas for me on the MCAT. Im considering Princeton Review and hope to take the MCAT next year.





For clarity sake I must say that my overall school GPA is 3.2 and my science is around 3.3. My predicted AMCAS science and overall would be low 3.0’s.