I'll add a little more to keep this thread going.
When I was a freshman, I attended two meetings of the university pre-med club, and never went back. I was the youngest in there; there were mostly juniors. These juniors didn't seem to be aware of the MCAT. They didn't know what it was. Even worse, the president of the club was an absolute joke. To start, she invited medical schools to come and visit us and present an admissions panel/Q & A session. She only invited medical schools from the Carribean. She told us all she had taken the MCAT and was applying to medical school soon, and said that research is not at all necessary on your application, nor is shadowing. She said she'd have 20-30 hours of shadowing on her application after she applied and that it was enough to be competitive. I told her that I'd heard 100-200 hours of shadowing was more common, and she just stared at me. There are only a handful of pre-meds at my university and our advising program is very, very weak. My pre-med advisor (one of only two pre-med advisors for the whole university) told me after my first semester of college that I could not make into medical school because I had a D and an F that first semester. That's a terrible thing to say to someone who's only finished their first semester of college; struggling during the first year of college is not an instant DQ for medical school. I'm not easily deterred, luckily. Even worse, the reason I failed those classes was because I had just left my abusive ex with our two month old son, and my court hearings were scheduled during one class, and I had no babysitter for the other class, and the advisor knew this. Personally, I would've offered a student in my circumstances support, suggested where to find resources, etc. The way that that advisor spoke to me was inappropriate, I think, and I hate to think how many perhaps less informed or less determined pre-med students he turned off the path, and how many potentially competitive applicants were screwed over by that pre-med club.
A tidbit from last night: I was explaining to my friend that doing clinical and non-clinical volunteering, shadowing, etc., are important as a pre-med, and that they're practically required to get into medical school. He was appalled and told me he'd never "give in to that system" and believes that those kinds of time- and effort-intensive requirements can be gotten around by "developing the right contacts." Cue face palm.
