Should I let a lack of variety of experience postpone my application?

Nontraditional Premed Discussion
1

Quick background of me. I am a 30 year old male and have been a professional chef since I was 18. I went for my first undergrad at 26, and did school full time and work full time in restaurants for the first 2 years, 25-30 hours my junior year, and 2 part time jobs equaling 40 hours last semester. I have a 3.94 GPA and my last practice MCAT was 512 (my test day is 4-6).

I think I am a very competitive candidate except my one problem, I have a limited variety of experiences, in particular no research or volunteering. It is not for lack of want but a lack of time. I decided to go pre med the end of my sophomore year (so less than 2 years ago) so I haven’t been building experiences over a long period of time, and I have needed to consistently work throughout schooling. In my junior year I started worked as a medical scribe for clinical experience, 25-30 hours a week, about 1500 hours total, working with 15 different doctors. Personally this has been sufficient exposure to medicine so that I know this is the right decision for me, and I have strong LOR due to this, but I know that most other candidates will have a much wider range of experiences.

My question is should I postpone applying this cycle? I am prepared to explain why I don’t have experiences, and I plan to do things during my gap year, but I’m worried that it may cause my application to be overlooked. if I don’t get an interview I can’t explain myself.
Anyone have any insight on this?

2

I think you’d be fine applying with your current resume. You’ve had a professional career from a young age, was able to continue that career despite being in school, and have gotten a lot of clinical exposure to help you make your decision to pursue medicine. At this point, I think all you would be doing in delaying is superficially broadening your experiences because it’s something you feel like you have to do and not something that you necessarily have a desire to do. Doing other things won’t hurt you, by any stretch of the imagination, but at this point I think you’ve checked all of the minimum requirements (assuming you take the MCAT on schedule). Embrace the non-trad-ness and fight the neurotic urge (that we all have) to try to do everything that everyone else did + 1.

You can try to use part of your personal statement to explain your journey to medicine, why you made the decisions you did in life in general, how you’ve gotten to this point, and why you want to make the change now. That may get people interested enough to hear the rest of your story straight from your mouth.

Worst case, you get overlooked this cycle and you do all of the stuff you were planning to do in your gap year anyway to “strengthen” your application. If you can afford the ridiculous cost of applying this year and potentially next year, I say go for it. Best case, you start medical school in 2019.