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I'm a 4 time applicant, currently an M1 at EVMS. I have a sub-3.0 undergrad GPA. I did an SMP. My MCAT is 31O. I worked in another field for 20 years before starting med school. I've invested nearly a decade in a thorough qualitative understanding of the med school admissions process, and I'd like it to not be wasted. Here's my contribution to the reapp forum; take it or leave it.
Mistakes that result in rejection
1. Submit primary/secondaries late
2. Apply with missing critical assets
3. Apply with an unredeemed low GPA
4. Apply with a low MCAT
5. Use an LOR from a rogue source
6. Fail to get good essay review
7. Fail to prepare for interviews
I allege that it would be better to wait out the app year if any of these apply to you.
Smart things people do in a reapplication
a. Show at least one substantial new asset
b. Get at least one new LOR
c. Rewrite everything
d. Show continued EC involvement
Assume you got rejected for good reason. Assume schools will pull up your old app and review it along with your new app. If you decide to believe that you are the victim of racism or sexism or age discrimination, you are most likely in denial.
Notes
Mistake #1: Submit primary/secondaries late
- Deadlines are irrelevant. If you are thinking you can get in if you "beat" the deadline, take a read through this forum and get acquainted with the many 3.8/34 students who do their primary (AMCAS/AACOMAS/TMDSAS) in September and finish their secondaries in Oct/Nov/Dec and wait out the year in thwarted frustration and anguish.
- Apply early. Submit your primary app as close to the opening date as you can. If your "applying early" plan doesn't include an MCAT score, you're not applying early. Complete secondaries right away - such as by the end of the weekend.
- Some advisers will tell you that an August MCAT is fine for a same-summer med school app. It's not. It's app suicide.
Mistake #2: Apply with missing critical assets
- Don't apply without an MCAT score and substantial exposure to clinical medicine.
- Applying before you have your LORs may also be a mistake.
- It's fine to submit AMCAS/AACOMAS/TMDSAS ahead of getting your MCAT score, so that you get in line for transcript review. But until your app includes an MCAT score, it's not complete. No, schools will not start reviewing you before your MCAT score is available. No, you aren't "early" without an MCAT score, regardless of when you submit your primary.
- If you haven't worked and observed in a hospital and/or clinic for a substantial number of hours, you have no credibility as a med school applicant. Hour count is usually in the hundreds, but the point is to immerse yourself in the clinical experience, with your brain turned on, thinking and learning and asking questions, so that you have some basis to comprehend what you're getting into. (Side note: if you have no work experience such as fast food or waiting tables or customer service or cubicle servitude, you may be unprepared to learn what you need to learn about whether you'll like clinical work, because you have no basis of comparison.)
- Unfinished prereqs don't matter for applying. They matter after you get accepted. If you have unfinished prereqs, but your MCAT score is in, you have the rest of the year to deal with it.
- Research is not a critical asset except at med schools where it is a critical asset. Don't take on research in lieu of the basics: GPA, MCAT, clinical exposure.
- LORs are critical, but it's not clear how many schools will review LORs before secondaries. If you want to have your act together, get your LORs done before transcript review is done.
Mistake #3: Apply with an unredeemed low GPA
- Minimums are irrelevant and don't apply to you.
- AAMC has very useful stats here: https://www.aamc.org/data/facts/. AACOM and TMDSAS are less transparent.
- Let's review. About 45,000 students apply MD/DO each year. About 24,000 get seats. Are lots of those 24,000 accepted students lucky low GPA/MCAT lottery winners? No, they are not. You are absolutely fooling yourself if you think your special uniqueness will get you in with a low GPA/MCAT.
- Use your statistics knowledge and figure out how many standard deviations from the accepted average you are. If you're within one standard deviation of the average, maybe you'll be okay. If you're more than one standard deviation from average, you need redemption. This is a good table to work from: https://www.aamc.org/download/161700/data/table21.pdf
- GPA redemption means that in lieu of a strong undergrad performance, you do additional sustained classroom study to demonstrate that you are med school material. Is one A in one class going to redeem a 3.2? No. Is 2 years of full time study at a 3.7+ going to redeem a 3.2? Yes. Is a 3.7+ in an SMP going to redeem a sub-3.0? Maybe.
- But: your cumulative undergrad GPA is always a big deal. If you have GPA damage, cast a wide net: apply to lots of schools and work hard to highlight your GPA redemption. The simple fact is that lots of schools won't consider your GPA redemption because your cumulative GPA is low. No, there isn't a list of these schools. Accept this and apply widely with the most compelling app you can produce.
- Two things need to happen from a low GPA. First, you have to prove to yourself that you will make it through med school. Second, you have to prove to med schools that you will make it through med school. A sustained strong performance in mostly hard science coursework is that proof.
- You're not redeemed until you're redeemed. You may not be able to schedule your GPA redemption. mommy2three and I both did sub-3.0 work in our first attempts at GPA redemption. So we had to do additional coursework (medical masters programs, or SMPs, with very high GPA) to get into med school. Not quitting was the key factor.
Mistake #4: Apply with a low MCAT
- Minimums are irrelevant and don't apply to you.
- The MCAT is how med schools normalize your GPA and predict your board scores.
- If you have a 4.0 but you can't break 30 on the MCAT, that devalues your 4.0.
- <Edit>If you get below 8 on any section, it doesn't matter if you get 14 on another.</Edit>
- As with GPA, you have to prove to yourself that you're ready for hours-long standardized tests, as well as proving this to med schools. If you haven't mastered test taking, med school will suck bad.
- If your plan is to submit early but take the MCAT as late as possible, such as in June or July, then you've paid for the wedding before you meet the bride. If you get punked on the MCAT after you submitted your primary, close your app. Sit out the year. Don't try to hurry up and get more MCAT points - this is naive. Look at the AAMC data for MCAT retakes - the vast majority of retakes get the same or lower score.
Mistake #5: Use an LOR from a rogue source
- Getting a professor to write you a letter is not the same thing as getting a good letter.
- If you did not have direct positive-impression-forming contact with a professor, such as going to office hours, asking questions about the material, and/or getting great exam grades, and you ask that professor for a letter, you are gambling.
- When you ask a professor for an LOR, their immediate response is indicative of how good that letter will be. If a professor balks or hesitates or doesn't look you in the eye, and you pursue that letter, you are gambling.
- It's a strong positive when a professor wants to meet with you about a letter or have you review the letter.
- For the love of all that's holy use a letter service like Interfolio. There's no more efficient way to piss off faculty than to go back a year or two later and ask for a letter to be resent. If you use only the AMCAS letter service, you can't get your letters to anything other than a US MD school. Mistake.
Mistake #6: Fail to get good essay review
- Your peers/parents/friends are not good primary essay reviewers. Let them help you find spelling/punctuation/grammar errors, but ignore their theme/content feedback.
- Get faculty and/or physicians to give you brutal feedback. Have you convinced a qualified audience that you have a mature and responsible basis for pursuing med school?
- Picture your personal statement in a pile of 5000 incredibly similar personal statements. Be kind to your reader. Make your point, don't accessorize every damn noun and verb, and be humble. All that stuff you learned in junior high about sentence and paragraph structure is a pretty good way to go.
Mistake #7: Fail to prepare for interviews
- Your peers/parents/friends are not good interviewers. They can help you with grooming and good manners, but they're not mean enough to give good feedback.
- As above, get faculty and/or physicians to give you brutal feedback. Do as many mock interviews as you can.
- Do some videotaped practice interviews with faculty/physicians who make you nervous. If you come across as a 14 year old, you have work to do. If you say "like" or "um" or fidget uncontrollably, you have work to do.
- Study the per-school interview feedback on SDN.
- Put some time in, early and often, on healthcare policy/economics/ethics. Nothing you see/hear on TV, Fox/MSNBC/CNN/ABC/CBS/NBC, can help you in the slightest. Find the sites like the UWash bioethics web quizzes. Know what the incredibly important current events are, like whether the state in which you're interviewing will support Medicaid expansion and/or insurance exchanges. Know some basics of what the ACA does and what it means if the ACA is repealed. Atul Gawande books and articles are very informative and easy to read.
Smart reapp strategy a: Show at least one substantial new asset
- If your new app is no different from your old app, why would you get different results?
- A substantial new asset includes things like completing an SMP, getting more points on the MCAT, doing the Peace Corps or Americorps or Teach for America or having a job with responsibility, publishing a research paper, and other things that take a 40 hour per week commitment for six months or more.
- Note that you most likely cannot be ready to reapply with a substantial new asset in a consecutive year. If you did not get accepted by April 2012, and you have not been investing in a new asset, then no, you are not ready to reapply in June 2012.
- Note that being enrolled in an SMP is no longer a substantial new asset. See the postbac forum to see the decreasing number of students who are able to start med school immediately after completing an SMP. It's wiser to wait to reapply until you have completed an SMP.
Smart reapp strategy b: Get at least one new LOR
- Get a new LOR from your substantial new asset.
Smart reapp strategy c: Rewrite everything
- Med schools will look at your old app and your new app, side by side. It's completely demoralizing, to reviewers, when a student expects different results from an unchanged app.
- If you only apply to new schools, then your old essays may suffice, but how do you know they were any good the first time?
Smart reapp strategy d: Show continued EC involvement
- Keep doing clinical volunteering.
- New ECs, such as triathlons or teaching MCAT or taking a responsible leadership position or backpacking in Europe, are good to add to a reapp.
Best of luck to you.
Mistakes that result in rejection
1. Submit primary/secondaries late
2. Apply with missing critical assets
3. Apply with an unredeemed low GPA
4. Apply with a low MCAT
5. Use an LOR from a rogue source
6. Fail to get good essay review
7. Fail to prepare for interviews
I allege that it would be better to wait out the app year if any of these apply to you.
Smart things people do in a reapplication
a. Show at least one substantial new asset
b. Get at least one new LOR
c. Rewrite everything
d. Show continued EC involvement
Assume you got rejected for good reason. Assume schools will pull up your old app and review it along with your new app. If you decide to believe that you are the victim of racism or sexism or age discrimination, you are most likely in denial.
Notes
Mistake #1: Submit primary/secondaries late
- Deadlines are irrelevant. If you are thinking you can get in if you "beat" the deadline, take a read through this forum and get acquainted with the many 3.8/34 students who do their primary (AMCAS/AACOMAS/TMDSAS) in September and finish their secondaries in Oct/Nov/Dec and wait out the year in thwarted frustration and anguish.
- Apply early. Submit your primary app as close to the opening date as you can. If your "applying early" plan doesn't include an MCAT score, you're not applying early. Complete secondaries right away - such as by the end of the weekend.
- Some advisers will tell you that an August MCAT is fine for a same-summer med school app. It's not. It's app suicide.
Mistake #2: Apply with missing critical assets
- Don't apply without an MCAT score and substantial exposure to clinical medicine.
- Applying before you have your LORs may also be a mistake.
- It's fine to submit AMCAS/AACOMAS/TMDSAS ahead of getting your MCAT score, so that you get in line for transcript review. But until your app includes an MCAT score, it's not complete. No, schools will not start reviewing you before your MCAT score is available. No, you aren't "early" without an MCAT score, regardless of when you submit your primary.
- If you haven't worked and observed in a hospital and/or clinic for a substantial number of hours, you have no credibility as a med school applicant. Hour count is usually in the hundreds, but the point is to immerse yourself in the clinical experience, with your brain turned on, thinking and learning and asking questions, so that you have some basis to comprehend what you're getting into. (Side note: if you have no work experience such as fast food or waiting tables or customer service or cubicle servitude, you may be unprepared to learn what you need to learn about whether you'll like clinical work, because you have no basis of comparison.)
- Unfinished prereqs don't matter for applying. They matter after you get accepted. If you have unfinished prereqs, but your MCAT score is in, you have the rest of the year to deal with it.
- Research is not a critical asset except at med schools where it is a critical asset. Don't take on research in lieu of the basics: GPA, MCAT, clinical exposure.
- LORs are critical, but it's not clear how many schools will review LORs before secondaries. If you want to have your act together, get your LORs done before transcript review is done.
Mistake #3: Apply with an unredeemed low GPA
- Minimums are irrelevant and don't apply to you.
- AAMC has very useful stats here: https://www.aamc.org/data/facts/. AACOM and TMDSAS are less transparent.
- Let's review. About 45,000 students apply MD/DO each year. About 24,000 get seats. Are lots of those 24,000 accepted students lucky low GPA/MCAT lottery winners? No, they are not. You are absolutely fooling yourself if you think your special uniqueness will get you in with a low GPA/MCAT.
- Use your statistics knowledge and figure out how many standard deviations from the accepted average you are. If you're within one standard deviation of the average, maybe you'll be okay. If you're more than one standard deviation from average, you need redemption. This is a good table to work from: https://www.aamc.org/download/161700/data/table21.pdf
- GPA redemption means that in lieu of a strong undergrad performance, you do additional sustained classroom study to demonstrate that you are med school material. Is one A in one class going to redeem a 3.2? No. Is 2 years of full time study at a 3.7+ going to redeem a 3.2? Yes. Is a 3.7+ in an SMP going to redeem a sub-3.0? Maybe.
- But: your cumulative undergrad GPA is always a big deal. If you have GPA damage, cast a wide net: apply to lots of schools and work hard to highlight your GPA redemption. The simple fact is that lots of schools won't consider your GPA redemption because your cumulative GPA is low. No, there isn't a list of these schools. Accept this and apply widely with the most compelling app you can produce.
- Two things need to happen from a low GPA. First, you have to prove to yourself that you will make it through med school. Second, you have to prove to med schools that you will make it through med school. A sustained strong performance in mostly hard science coursework is that proof.
- You're not redeemed until you're redeemed. You may not be able to schedule your GPA redemption. mommy2three and I both did sub-3.0 work in our first attempts at GPA redemption. So we had to do additional coursework (medical masters programs, or SMPs, with very high GPA) to get into med school. Not quitting was the key factor.
Mistake #4: Apply with a low MCAT
- Minimums are irrelevant and don't apply to you.
- The MCAT is how med schools normalize your GPA and predict your board scores.
- If you have a 4.0 but you can't break 30 on the MCAT, that devalues your 4.0.
- <Edit>If you get below 8 on any section, it doesn't matter if you get 14 on another.</Edit>
- As with GPA, you have to prove to yourself that you're ready for hours-long standardized tests, as well as proving this to med schools. If you haven't mastered test taking, med school will suck bad.
- If your plan is to submit early but take the MCAT as late as possible, such as in June or July, then you've paid for the wedding before you meet the bride. If you get punked on the MCAT after you submitted your primary, close your app. Sit out the year. Don't try to hurry up and get more MCAT points - this is naive. Look at the AAMC data for MCAT retakes - the vast majority of retakes get the same or lower score.
Mistake #5: Use an LOR from a rogue source
- Getting a professor to write you a letter is not the same thing as getting a good letter.
- If you did not have direct positive-impression-forming contact with a professor, such as going to office hours, asking questions about the material, and/or getting great exam grades, and you ask that professor for a letter, you are gambling.
- When you ask a professor for an LOR, their immediate response is indicative of how good that letter will be. If a professor balks or hesitates or doesn't look you in the eye, and you pursue that letter, you are gambling.
- It's a strong positive when a professor wants to meet with you about a letter or have you review the letter.
- For the love of all that's holy use a letter service like Interfolio. There's no more efficient way to piss off faculty than to go back a year or two later and ask for a letter to be resent. If you use only the AMCAS letter service, you can't get your letters to anything other than a US MD school. Mistake.
Mistake #6: Fail to get good essay review
- Your peers/parents/friends are not good primary essay reviewers. Let them help you find spelling/punctuation/grammar errors, but ignore their theme/content feedback.
- Get faculty and/or physicians to give you brutal feedback. Have you convinced a qualified audience that you have a mature and responsible basis for pursuing med school?
- Picture your personal statement in a pile of 5000 incredibly similar personal statements. Be kind to your reader. Make your point, don't accessorize every damn noun and verb, and be humble. All that stuff you learned in junior high about sentence and paragraph structure is a pretty good way to go.
Mistake #7: Fail to prepare for interviews
- Your peers/parents/friends are not good interviewers. They can help you with grooming and good manners, but they're not mean enough to give good feedback.
- As above, get faculty and/or physicians to give you brutal feedback. Do as many mock interviews as you can.
- Do some videotaped practice interviews with faculty/physicians who make you nervous. If you come across as a 14 year old, you have work to do. If you say "like" or "um" or fidget uncontrollably, you have work to do.
- Study the per-school interview feedback on SDN.
- Put some time in, early and often, on healthcare policy/economics/ethics. Nothing you see/hear on TV, Fox/MSNBC/CNN/ABC/CBS/NBC, can help you in the slightest. Find the sites like the UWash bioethics web quizzes. Know what the incredibly important current events are, like whether the state in which you're interviewing will support Medicaid expansion and/or insurance exchanges. Know some basics of what the ACA does and what it means if the ACA is repealed. Atul Gawande books and articles are very informative and easy to read.
Smart reapp strategy a: Show at least one substantial new asset
- If your new app is no different from your old app, why would you get different results?
- A substantial new asset includes things like completing an SMP, getting more points on the MCAT, doing the Peace Corps or Americorps or Teach for America or having a job with responsibility, publishing a research paper, and other things that take a 40 hour per week commitment for six months or more.
- Note that you most likely cannot be ready to reapply with a substantial new asset in a consecutive year. If you did not get accepted by April 2012, and you have not been investing in a new asset, then no, you are not ready to reapply in June 2012.
- Note that being enrolled in an SMP is no longer a substantial new asset. See the postbac forum to see the decreasing number of students who are able to start med school immediately after completing an SMP. It's wiser to wait to reapply until you have completed an SMP.
Smart reapp strategy b: Get at least one new LOR
- Get a new LOR from your substantial new asset.
Smart reapp strategy c: Rewrite everything
- Med schools will look at your old app and your new app, side by side. It's completely demoralizing, to reviewers, when a student expects different results from an unchanged app.
- If you only apply to new schools, then your old essays may suffice, but how do you know they were any good the first time?
Smart reapp strategy d: Show continued EC involvement
- Keep doing clinical volunteering.
- New ECs, such as triathlons or teaching MCAT or taking a responsible leadership position or backpacking in Europe, are good to add to a reapp.
Best of luck to you.
Last edited:
And from what the current fellows tell me, the subspecialty board exam I'll be taking in a few years is the very worst of them all....
