1) Your individual scores and composite score
39 S: 13-13-13 (August 2006)
2) The study method used for each section
I did the Princeton Review classroom course. I highly recommend it if you need someone to keep you focussed. I had a full time research job that ended the day before the MCAT, so if I didn't have the TPR to keep me on track, I probably wouldn't have done as well. I did all the assigned homework and went to every diagnostic exam. You get what you put in for these prep courses.
Biological sciences - did all the practice questions from the TPR workbooks, memorized the book they gave me, and in the final weeks I went over the stuff I was weak on.
Physical sciences - same thing. Understand and memorize!
Verbal - I did a lot of passages. I bought the EK 101 Verbal passages book about a month before the exam to supplement TPR verbal passages, which I found were so different from real AAMC passages. The EK passages *are* somewhat ambiguous, but they were an excellent way to build stamina and annotation efficiency. During the week before the MCAT I did one EK verbal section a day, during my lunch break. I was also working full time in a lab.
Writing - TPR gave us a list of the categories of topics, eg. Government, Ethics, Justic, etc. I started a notebook of examples for each topic. I got a trial subscription to The Economist and Time (free 6 mths with TPR course) and read it for example ideas. If I found one relevant to a past essay prompt or topic, I would search the details on the internet. Wikipedia became my god. I found a good strategy for the writing sample was to think of your examples for thesis and antithesis first, then looking for the difference between those examples (and voila, a synthesis). The other way would be to think of the differences first, then find examples to fit it. But this was harder. In the August MCAT, I got extremely lucky with my prompts and didn't blank on the essays at all (I would've if I had gotten something related to politics or justice...boo!). I ended up using examples I mostly knew off the top of my head already and didn't really need my example book! And just to show that you don't need spectacular examples: I talked about Sex and the City on my first essay.
It's all about how you say it, not what you say!
3) What materials you used for each section(Kaplan, TPR, Examkrackers, AAMC, etc)
TPR textbooks and review material, supplemented with EK 101 Verbal passages in the last month.
4) Which practice tests did you use?
AAMC practice tests 3 to 9, as well as TPR tests A-D and the 5 diagnostic tests. I passingly glanced at some Kaplan Gold standard tests too, but I didn't find them very similar to real AAMC tests.
5) What was your undergraduate major?
Physiology, minor in Psychology.
6) Any other tips you may have for those of us who still have this test lurking over us?
There's nothing glamourous about it... the more you study, the better you'll do. If you choose to have a social life while studying, just know your score will suffer.
The key is to study *effectively*. Practise tests by TPR or Kaplan are good up to a point, but during the final weeks leading up to the MCAT, I switched over to AAMC practise tests to put myself in the right mindset. I did two AAMC tests a week, on Sat and Sun, during the last two weeks.
The MCAT will break you and it will destroy your soul. I was very discouraged the whole summer. It didn't help that I couldn't score higher than 33P on my TPR diagnostics either... but I did a lot better on the AAMC tests which really boosted my confidence.
I set myself a goal and you should do the same. At first I put "45T" on a post-it above my desk and aimed high... the next month I put up "39Q" over the post-it... and the next month I replaced it with something like "30P". Lol.
I came out of the real MCAT shell-shocked and not feeling I did that well... IGNORE THESE VOICES. There's nothing you can do after the MCAT, and how you felt about it is no indication of how well you did!
No matter how discouraged you feel during the preparation process, don't give up! (This is easy to say in hindsight, I know.)
7) How long did you study for the MCAT?
May to August. 8 hours of classroom time a week. I forget how many hours per week I was studying, but when I wasn't working or in the TPR classroom, I was studying. Obviously I was less intense at the beginning of the summer.