ethereal_fae
Full Member
- Joined
- Jul 26, 2021
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Hello all! I am currently studying for the MCAT and planning to apply to medical school next cycle but I'm starting to have second thoughts... my GPA is really low and I don't know if a high MCAT (assuming I achieve a high score ofc) will be enough to make my app competitive or if I should start looking into SMPs. I don't think a post-bacc will work for me because I am a nontraditional student and I have almost 300 credits so there's really no salvaging my undergraduate GPA at this point. I would really appreciate any thoughts or advice! Some info about me:
- cGPA and sGPA as calculated by AMCAS or AACOMAS: cGPA 3.25 sGPA 3.4
- State of residence: OR w/ ties to MI
- Ethnicity: Latina (Colombian so not URM but immigrant and from a rural area)
- Undergraduate institution or category: public state school
- Clinical experience (volunteer and non-volunteer): 4000+ hours paid employment in urgent care (combination of patient contact and clerical duties), 2000+ hours paid employment as a HUC in an ICU (combination of patient contact and clerical duties), 250 hours volunteering in free clinic for low income patients, scheduled to start hospital volunteering this summer
- Research experience and productivity: 3000 hours in NIH funded research fellowship for underrepresented students in STEM, about 2000 other hours in two other labs and one independent project, 7 poster presentations at national and regional conferences, 1 oral presentation, 1 first author publication in low impact journal. All research was either clinical or public health and all focused on health equity
- Shadowing experience and specialties represented: about 30 hours in trauma, anesthesiology, general surgery, and critical care. Still trying to get primary care shadowing
- Non-clinical volunteering: 300 hours volunteering for non-profit (lgbtq+ advocacy), 150 hours volunteering at local YWCA, about 50 hours so far volunteering at soup kitchen
- Other extracurricular activities: participated in three different mentorship programs (one where I mentored high schoolers interested in STEM, two where I mentor younger pre-health students from underrepresented backgrounds), founded a undergraduate advisory committee at my university (current president), active member in three leadership committees at my university, AMWA internship, helped launch harm reduction mobile clinic
- Anything else not listed you think might be important: immigrant from rural town, grew up low SES and went to extremely underfunded schools that taught very outdated curriculum so I feel like I'm pretty disadvantaged. I have 8 years of paid employment in various customer service jobs