Yes it is. Your goal as an applicant is to get in to medical school, not to almost get in. The above posters (Guitardan77, tec, pi1304, LJSimpson, redo-it-all, gonnif) all gave you very sage advice. They know what they're talking about regarding the application mechanics. (tec is a doctor and pi1304 & LJSimpson are current medical students.) This process is also not cheap and you would be spending a lot of money for a marginal-to-no chance of entry this cycle while hurting your chances for next cycle. Just to give you an idea of what you're in for - I personally spent $4700 in my application year (MCAT, interview travel, photographs, postage, lodging, primaries, secondaries, transcripts, etc). If I were you, I would not want to have to spend that $4700 two years in a row. I don't know about you, but I could think of much more fun things to do with an extra $4700.
"But if you aren't blowing huge wads of cash during application season, you ain't trying hard enough." -BaileyPup
Like I said, I’m sorry that I went to pieces over this, and I appreciate all the good advice. Sometimes patience isn’t my greatest virtue.
On the plus side, waiting until next year to do MCATs gives me the chance to make my score even more competitive, as long as I can keep my grades up. A&P is kind of incredibly intimidating.
Starri, it sounds like you have backed away from the ledge so I won’t browbeat you like I would have if I hadn’t been interviewing yeasterday. j/l
Don’t worry about when you get in just worry about getting in. Last year I had an admissions rep almost talk me into applying for last year, by taking OCHEm 1 and 2 in the summer and taking the MCAT in September. After I thought about it I realized that its costs the schools nothing for me to do that, but I was basically going to kill myself during my first summer in a new city on the chance that I could get in. I know the excitement of getting into med-school can make you want to force it, but everyone who you read about in the application thread this year had to spend a lot more time working at it than they wanted. You do that because you want to do this process right the first time. I have no doubt that my fellow “Class of 2016ers” are all going to be starting somewhere next fall and looking back now I am so thankful I waited the extra year. You will be thankful too.
Also Tic thanks for the shout-out, that may be my crowning achievement on this board.
Starri - I’d echo BaileyPup. I spent 1 year trying to get into a General Chem course (so I could take Organic the next year) in my home city. Eventually realized that there was not a college in the city (with some big health sciences campuses) where I could get in to a gen chem course as a community scholar (not enrolling in a degree program). I then started a post-bacc program, a year later than I hoped to be doing prereqs. (so, start postbacc at 51 instead of 50)
I applied for admission to a program which my school was negotiating having a linkage with…was allowed to apply as a “test case” when I still had most of my core prereqs in progress. It would have been for an admission conditional on my grades and MCAT score, but would have let me skip my glide year. That was NOT successful (I did find out later that the week before they notified me I was not accepted, the dean at the university where my post-bacc program was had decided to sever the negotiations for linkage, so perhaps politics figured in to it).
I had some real panic as I recalculated:
Instead of entering med school at 52, and being 56 when I started my residency (and 59 when I finished), I’d be starting at 53, starting residency at 57! and finished at 60! hORRORS!!! (you see how much worse that is???
Took me quite some time to calm down and reflect that the changing of my age was outside of my control. What I COULD control was taking an MCAT prep course (I took Kaplan), taking MCAT’s early, applying early (June), applying widely, and doing my best at every interview I got to get admitted to that school like it was my number one choice.
That landed me a wait-list and 3 acceptances, including one at my first choice school.
I can also control my routine now - which includes dietary and exercise changes to try to improve my health in prep for residency in less than 3 years.
The time will pass. The hardest thing for me was that I had pictured starting the year before, and had to change my “vision” for what I was doing to accomodate starting a year later.
Decided to enjoy that “glide” year, stayed and worked in the city near my mom and stepfather, and spent lots of time with them. Visited family and friends and stored up some family time in preparation for the much more limited opportunities I have now to do that. I’m not at all sorry for that year, now. It’s just an initial effort to change gears.
Best of luck, and I’m glad you are out of the initial panic/fatalism. Your chances can be GOOD - if you continue to make the efforts that ensure it. Think of all that lovely MCAT prep time you will have
Thank you very much for the kind words. It gets scary, but it’s also exciting. My husband, who has the patience of a saint, told me “You thought you couldn’t do Calculus, you can do Calculus. You thought you couldn’t do Statistics, you got an A. You never thought you would do well in General Chemistry, you ended up tutoring people. You didn’t think you could do Organic Chemistry, you did. You didn’t think you could ever do Physics, and you got an A.”
I am so my own worst enemy here. Now the pep-talks are about MCATs, Biochem, and A&P. If/when I graduate med school, it will be because of him.
I could not agree more with Richard, Kate, and others. Take your time on preparation for the MCAT and do well the first time. The fact that the MCAT is standardized makes it a great equalizer for the variations among undergrad/post-bacc quality and GPA fluctuations.
Too many premeds, both older and younger, are so anxious and impatient to start practicing medicine, that they skimp on preparation: they rush through their undergrad, do the bare minimum of ECs, under-prepare for the MCAT, and even will go to med schools for which they are not a good match just so they could get their MD or DO degree faster.
For example, a few months ago, a doctor with whom I volunteer was telling me about his son, who also wants to be a doctor. Despite going to a top-notched undergrad institution and doing well on the MCAT, the son’s ECs were weak: He only did the bare minimum of volunteer work (with our non-profit in rural Mexico) and some hours shadowing other doctors domestically. Of course, the son did not get into any U.S. med school. I suggested to the doctor that he tell his son to shore up his application by showing greater commitment to the field through a bit more extensive volunteer work given the rest of his application was good.
Fast forward six months. I was volunteering with this doctor again this past weekend, and he told me that his son just started at Caribbean med school, and the son never did fix his lack of ECs. So despite a 3.7 GPA and 35+ MCAT, the kid is going to an offshore medical school when he probably could have gone to a stateside medical school. And since he will be a foreign medical graduate, he will have to deal with the extra exams and perhaps limited choices for residencies that go with a foreign medical degree. I am not against going offshore, but only as an alternative and not as your primary choice – unless, of course, you want that island experience and the hassles of being a FMG/IMG.
for what it is worth, I do believe that someone who gets A in the science pre-reqs is very capable of scoring in the double digits on the MCAT science section. You just need the appropriate prep and get used to the MCAT type of approach. MCAT is not meant to test but to trick.
Our oldest student is 53 and does quite well. It really depends upon the school as to how much weight they place on the test itself. I have a good friend who was accepted into a top ten school with a 24, as that school’s major interest was GPA. Please don’t get discouraged. In reference to redo-it-all’s post, I disagree that MCAT is meant to trick, as it really tests in my opinion what is the core skill of a physician, the ability to think and reason. To me, answering an MCAT question is much like formulating a diagnosis, which given my experience was one of the reasons I felt I did so well despite my limited preparation. I’ve found it very interesting that the engineers and hard science majors in my class had a much harder time with the MCAT then those with experience in other fields. (My study partner is a former NASA engineer, triple master degrees, 3.9 GPA, absolute genius, but his MCAT was seven points lower than mine) I can only assume is has something to do with the difference in approaching a problem. If you’re having trouble with the MCAT then I would examine how you approach the questions. Hope this helps!
I personally know a several people who all did really well at the MCAT. Most got above 36, and two got 43’s.
I’ve been able to question them and find out their study strategies. But, it seems they all had different study strategies, all uniquely tailored to their own ways of critical thinking, remembering and problem-solving.
The ones I find most useful are
repetition of material over a long-time period (So I am studying physics, chemistry, organic chemistry, biology, and verbal; and then repeating them on a monthly basis)
practice tests (so I am starting to take full-length practice tests as if they were the real tests)
continually questioning “What did I do wrong” at as you correct yourself to improve
(My study partner is a former NASA engineer, triple master degrees, 3.9 GPA, absolute genius, but his MCAT was seven points lower than mine) I can only assume is has something to do with the difference in approaching a problem. If you're having trouble with the MCAT then I would examine how you approach the questions. Hope this helps!
The MCAT may be the first test for a lot of people where there isn't necessarily a 100% right answer - just a "best answer." Or perhaps it's that you won't necessarily know that your answer is right. With, say, a regular physics test, you'll have a problem, and after working through it, you'll know if you got it right or not. The MCAT is not a sceince test; it is a critical thinking test. So even if you got the right answer, you won't be certain of it by the time you need to move on. I think this trips up a lot of people who are used to a more deterministic "correctness" metric.
I think GPA trumps MCAT for the top tier schools, unless one is going MD/PhD. Most of my friends who had high GPAs went to top tier schools, even if their MCATs were dismal. There were a few exceptions, but they were rare.
I just want to add a comment that will probably disagree with most of what was written here.
I understand that one shouldn’t take the test unless well prepared, but if I had personally waited until I “felt” prepared, I would NEVER have taken the test. When it comes to the MCAT, I’ve tended to wear FUD like a sagging, crap filled diaper which lead to me registering and not taking the test 3 or 4 times( I can’t remember which) over the past few years before I actually took the d*mn test!
I guess what I’m saying is that after objectively realizing you’ve done all you can do prep wise, you just need to suck it up and take the test!
You are spot on that at some point you need to stop preparing and just take the test. The words of Wally Amos of Famous Amos Cookies comes to mind (and I am paraphrasing here), “You can research things to death, but at some point you need to stop researching and start doing.”
Or, in the text from a colleague who just started at UCSF medical school, “Just take the d&mn test!” after I texted him that I wanted to spend a few more months preparing for the MCAT.
* repetition of material over a long-time period (So I am studying physics, chemistry, organic chemistry, biology, and verbal; and then repeating them on a monthly basis)
* practice tests (so I am starting to take full-length practice tests as if they were the real tests)
* continually questioning "What did I do wrong" at as you correct yourself to improve
* work on efficiency: speed and accuracy
Most of these are important study techniques on the MCAT, but the fact is, rote memorization and material repetition should be done in your classes, ideally. The goal by the time you really hunker down and study for the MCAT is to understand HOW the test-makers ask their questions, and how they design *wrong* answers. Understanding that flipside of the coin brought my MCAT score up around 8 points.
And studying for the verbal reasoning section turned out to be the most helpful, because it's where you most clearly see the Tester Traps. Just a thought.
