Gap Year Recommendations

[HopefulHero]

Hello all,

I am a senior studying Biology with a concentration in Human Biology and I will be graduating this May. My current plan is to take a gap year to gain more clinical experience and study to take the MCAT before applying to med schools (allopathic and osteopathic) next year. My GPA is currently around a 3.4 and I've maintained several leadership positions, jobs, and extra curricular activities while in college.

I wanted to know what advice any of you had for a gap year before applying to medical school. What have some of you done to be as competitive as possible for applications?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you all in advance!

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[dr.0ne]

Do well on your MCAT as your GPA is in the 10th percentile for many allopathic medical schools. A high MCAT score doesn't necessarily make up for your GPA, but it should help your application gain more traction.

Can you retake some of your classes at a community college?
Research is a good option, try to get a publication.
Keep doing what you've been doing.

 

[HopefulHero]

Yes, I could retake some classes at my local community college. I've thought about research but it's been difficult finding labs and professors that need people to help with their research recently. Any other pieces of advice from person experiences?

 

[Scribblers]

The most common paid things you can do to get clinical experience are scribing and working in clinical research/as an RA. I've done both for the past year, and they are both generally pretty rewarding. Both will likely get you plenty of exposure to patients, although at different depths and from different perspectives. At least in my experience, the enrollment half of doing research gave much more direct interaction with patients than scribing (the difference between speaking with a patient and being more of a fly on the wall as they talk with the provider), but generally less volume. YMMV. Otherwise, scribing is a better experience for understanding what the day-to-day life of medicine is like whereas the research gives you more of a sense of how the evidence behind medicine comes together. Both of those things can be valuable for figuring out your career interests. The pay for either is usually not great (and in some cases non-existent) unless you luck out, so keep in mind that your lifestyle will be relatively spartan for the year.

 

[tpha5256]

If you don't go with a scribing job, it would be a great idea to continually shadow doctors. A gap year leaves you with a ton of time and flexibility to meet doctors in different specialties, and all of those experiences will help you determine what you want to do with your future, in addition to bolstering your application. From my own experience, doctors are more keen on letting college graduates shadow them because they have a better grasp on the medical science. If you tell them you are applying to medical school soon, they will take you even more seriously.