I am a current allopathic medical student who started med school at age 31. I applied at age 30 to 22 medical schools. Of those, I received 21 secondaries, was invited on 19 interviews, attended 17 of them, and received 12 acceptances, six with full scholarships.
I'll start by saying that my general philosophy is that there are two broad categories that you must consider as you go through the app process. The obvious one that we spend a lot of time discussing in this forum and elsewhere on SDN is how to improve your weak areas. That is certainly a major component of improving your competitiveness as an applicant. But one equally important aspect to being a successful applicant that we don't discuss nearly as often is that you must also highlight your strengths. Do not underestimate the importance of doing this: medical schools are not charities, and they are looking for people who are successful. You must show them that you are successful, as well as that you have the potential to continue being successful in med school and beyond.
I would say that there are six areas where medical school applicants must strive to distinguish themselves, whether they are trads or non-trads. These include the obvious ones like GPA and MCAT, but also ECs, essays, LORs, and interviewing skills. I will go through each one and give some examples from my own application saga.
GPA: This is a big area of weakness for a lot of non-trads because many of us have subpar UG GPAs for allopathic medical schools, and I am no different. I had an especially sticky problem in this respect because I had no UG GPA at all. I took all of my UG coursework (including the pre-med pre-reqs) P/F, and I have no credit hours or grades. AMCAS calculated my UG GPA as zero. As you can imagine, this caused me significant problems at several schools. I was able to overcome this problem in several ways. One was that I scored very high on the MCAT. A second was that I had graduate grades and GPAs for my MS and PhD. The third was that I copied my narrative evaluations from college and sent copies of them to all 22 schools along with a cover letter explaining how my college worked, as well as that it was accredited! This was amazingly expensive and time-consuming, but I believe that it helped considerably. When I went for pre-app counseling, one admissions office suggested that I consider taking a year of post-bac classes at the UG level in order to establish an UG GPA and prove that I could still handle the work. I elected not to do this since I was in grad school for my PhD at the time. My decision to not follow this advice may have hurt me at a few of the schools, particularly the ones that rejected me with no interview. In my applications and interviews, I stressed that my graduate record and MCAT scores both "proved" that I was capable and ready to handle medical school coursework.
MCAT: This was an area of immense strength for me. I scored a 43S on the MCAT in August 2004, and I have posted extensively about how to study for the MCAT on SDN over the past two years. You can find most of my MCAT advice in the MCAT forum and Study Questions subforum if you are interested. The MCAT score was not an area that I particularly had to do much explaining about on applications or at interviews; it basically spoke for itself.
Essays: This is another crucial aspect of your application. Both your PS and your secondary essays are read by the adcoms, and at most schools, by your interviewers. In general, your PS should answer the questions of why you want to go to med school, and what experiences you've had to back this assertion up. Initially, my PS was not very appropriate for a medical school application. I got a lot of feedback from some SDNers (thanks again, njb!) and the preadmissions counseling sessions about this. I decided to follow their advice, and I rewrote my PS from scratch along much more conventional lines. It wasn't nearly as entertaining to read, but it was a lot more appropriate. I think that this was one area where the pre-admissions counseling I received both at the med schools and from some SDNers helped me improve my app tremendously. I do not think I would have been as successful of an applicant if I had obstinately stuck with my first essay. In general, I advise all of you to ask others in the know (med students, admissions counselors, etc.) to read your essays. If everyone keeps making the same criticism, you probably should seriously consider taking their advice.
LORs: These are not directly in your control, but what *is* in your control is to carefully chose whom you are going to ask for letters, and to get the proper letters. Most schools require three LORs but will permit you to submit up to six. I usually sent four, but I had five total. I got letters from my PI for my PhD, my PI on the clinical trial where I volunteered, my manager at Kaplan, one of my PhD committee members, and one peer. (My state schools require peer letters. I asked a former UG student of mine who was an M1 at the time to write the peer letter for me.) Second, I advise you all to use interfolio (
www.interfolio.com ) or another online clearinghouse for your LORs. This makes both your life and the life of your recommenders MUCH easier. It costs a little more, but I think it was completely worth it in terms of the decreased stress associated with submitting LORs to the schools. Third, many schools want letters from non-science faculty. This was not possible in my case, because my UG Spanish professor had retired some time in the past ten years since I left the college. I asked those schools for permission to substitute the employer letter instead, and they all agreed to this. I advise you non-trads who have been out of school for a long time to ask your schools for permission to substitute employer letters too. It will make your life a lot easier. Also, when you ask people to write your letters, impress upon them that these letters must be strong, and they must attest to your abilities to succeed in medical school. The best LORs cite specific examples of things you have done to show that you possess characteristics like responsibility, a good work ethic, honesty, etc. Give the person a copy of your transcript and your CV to use in crafting the letter. Finally, it goes without saying that you should send thank you notes to everyone who writes you a LOR.
ECs: This was another area where I was kind of lopsided and did not have a very good appreciation of my strengths and weaknesses before I went for the preadmissions counseling. It was obvious to us all that my research background was one of my strengths. I was also extensively involved as a volunteer for BBBS, doing science demonstrations for inner-city elementary school kids, working on the MCAT subforum here on SDN, and volunteering as a co-investigator and project manager of the clinical trial. I thought that should be enough. However, what I learned from the counseling is that many medical schools would like to see RECENT CLINICAL volunteering. I was advised to volunteer in a hospital or clinic on top of these other things. I decided to take this advice, and I began volunteering in a hospital surgery waiting room. At the time, I was in my last year of grad school, and the only time I could do it was from 6-8 AM. This was incredibly painful. Every week, I would turn off the alarm clock at 5 AM and wish I could go back to sleep, but then I would ask myself: Q, would you rather get two more hours of sleep, or do you want to go to med school? And then I would get my butt out of bed and go volunteer. That I did this was TREMENDOUSLY important. I got asked about it at a third to a half of my interviews, even at several heavily research-intensive schools. What makes this all the more incredible is that I would not have even known about this weakness of mine, let alone taken steps to correct it, had I not gotten the preadmissions counseling.
One other thing I came to discover is that I had a "hidden" strength that I hadn't ever really considered before, and that was as an educator. Look again at my list of volunteering ECs, and you will see that nearly all of them involve teaching of some kind. I had also won two major teaching awards, and I was employed as an instructor for Kaplan and at my university. I didn't come to appreciate how important a strong teaching background is to the medical schools until after I had the preadmissions counseling. Now that I am in medical school, I appreciate the importance of it even more. Doctors spend their entire working lives teaching people: their patients, their colleagues, and themselves. Thus, medical schools are extremely interested in applicants with a teaching background. I wound up making this personal strength one of the central themes of my PS and discussing it extensively at my interviews. Again, I doubt I would have thought to do this had I not gone for preadmissions counseling.
Interviews: Once you have reached this point, the acceptance is still not in the bag. It is essential that you practice expressing the points you made in your PS in a clear, concise, and engaging way. It is also essential that you can articulate why you want to attend each school where you interview. I did several things to prepare for interviews. First of all, I studied extensively for every interview. I would estimate that it took me about 2-3 hours EACH to prepare for them. What was I doing for that long? Reading the school's entire website and making notes of interesting features or questions I had about the school. (Sometimes I even knew more about the features of the curriculum than my interviewer did.) Going through the interview feedback from that school on SDN. (There were several schools where I got asked the exact same questions I had already seen on SDN.) Re-reading my apps and making sure I could explain my UG thesis research from 12 years ago. (I actually did get asked about it at one school, and the interviewer was d*** impressed that I could rattle off the entire title of my UG thesis!) Engaging in mock interviews. This is key. Some of my fellow Kaplan instructors were home from med school for the summer, and I got a few of them to mock interview me. They were so combative and tough on me that every real interview I had was a cinch in comparison. They accused me of being arrogant because of my MCAT score, or claimed I was using their school as a safety school, or demanded that I "prove" that I had sufficient social skills to be a doctor, etc. It really made me think about how I presented myself and made me aware of how careful I had to be about what impression I was giving off to the interviewers.
Some other tips: I also got help with my essays and interviewing skills from the Office of Diversity at one of my state schools. This may sound strange, but it really isn't when you consider that diversity is a broad term that encompasses much, much more than just race and ethnicity. If you are a non-trad, you will add diversity to your class based on that reason alone. Second, I called every single school before I applied, explained my grade situation, and asked whether I should realistically apply there. A couple of schools discouraged me from applying. One actually outright told me no, that I almost certainly would not be accepted there. I decided not to apply to any school that was not encouraging, with the exception of the one school that rejected me presecondary.
I hope that this post has been helpful, and if anyone has any further questions, feel free to post them or PM me. Best of luck to the current applicants.