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What mentoring organizations have you connected with? Specifically any organizations supporting aspiring Black physicians? What do your prehealth advisors say? Any involvement with SNMA or MAPS?

Every HBCU medical school should be on your list. The extra year to get more clinical hours will help you. If you think you need more clinical hours, you probably do. Medical schools won't be going anywhere.

Your lack of detail on nonclinical volunteering makes me think you should take the extra year since chances are you have not fulfilled service orientation expectations.
 
You really need to consider an additional gap year. Applying with 30 hours of clinical experience is shooting your self in the foot. Projected hours are considered projected hours- the hours might or might not get completed. And when other applicants are applying with hundreds of hours, your 30 look pitiful.

What are your nonclinical activities? Make sure you do get to at least 150 hours before you apply.

Good luck as you move forward.,
 
These “additional gap years” are financially killing y’all. Mind you, I am a retired 73 y.o. doc but that “last” year of practice you are giving up has a value, in today’s dollars, for a dermatologist, of AT LEAST $500k. Would that sum be helpful in any way? ( that figure, sadly for the new generation, used to be much higher, and we didn’t have the debt y’all have). Never forget, medicine may be your passion, but it is a BUSINESS and nobody in the education pipeline will teach you that. There is a big, big difference between how that “gap years” looks when you are 22 and how it looks, retrospectively, at age ~63 pre-retirement.
Not necessarily “on topic” but certainly something everyone on this board needs to know. You will never learn it through the current, traditional educational pathway.
 
mike-sheree said:
These “additional gap years” are financially killing y’all. Mind you, I am a retired 73 y.o. doc but that “last” year of practice you are giving up has a value, in today’s dollars, for a dermatologist, of AT LEAST $500k. Would that sum be helpful in any way? ( that figure, sadly for the new generation, used to be much higher, and we didn’t have the debt y’all have). Never forget, medicine may be your passion, but it is a BUSINESS and nobody in the education pipeline will teach you that. There is a big, big difference between how that “gap years” looks when you are 22 and how it looks, retrospectively, at age ~63 pre-retirement.
Not necessarily “on topic” but certainly something everyone on this board needs to know. You will never learn it through the current, traditional educational pathway.
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If someone is retiring at 62, I assume you are saying they make at least $500k in that year. If someone is starting a year later, they either have to forego that $500k and retire at 62 or get that $500k and retire at 63, right?

However, applying without having strong conviction in your application and 'hoping' that you will get interviews/acceptances takes a significant toll on applicants. Did you consider the scenario where people apply, become re-applicants, and go through the same painful experience for another year? That is a lot of psychological pain compared to having $20M net worth and losing $500k because you are retiring the same year as your peers.

At the same time, I agree that one cannot succumb to analysis paralysis and spend years trying to perfect their application. If one is ready to take a chance and has no problem reapplying in case they don't get accepted for any reason, then yes, go ahead and apply.
 
mike-sheree said:
These “additional gap years” are financially killing y’all. Mind you, I am a retired 73 y.o. doc but that “last” year of practice you are giving up has a value, in today’s dollars, for a dermatologist, of AT LEAST $500k. Would that sum be helpful in any way? ( that figure, sadly for the new generation, used to be much higher, and we didn’t have the debt y’all have). Never forget, medicine may be your passion, but it is a BUSINESS and nobody in the education pipeline will teach you that. There is a big, big difference between how that “gap years” looks when you are 22 and how it looks, retrospectively, at age ~63 pre-retirement.
Not necessarily “on topic” but certainly something everyone on this board needs to know. You will never learn it through the current, traditional educational pathway.
Click to expand...
If I may add. You have a completely valid point. However, the dynamics for medical school applications have completely changed over the last 20 years. The number of applicants only increase each year, making the requirements and competitiveness of the system only increase year after year. I can confidently say that the activities that students have to do now is not the same of what was required of pre-health students 30-40 years ago. Due to there being a set amount of spots available for matriculants, it forces many to have to take gap years.
 
I’ll argue against any additional gap years any time I can. I think they are a detriment to the profession in the way they are promoted generally. In this specific case with a superstar app outside clinical hours and being a little light on non clinical volunteering people telling you to wait are very likely in the wrong in their determination that your chances of admission will be significantly greater with another gap year.

Get your clinical hours to 150 and same with your non clinical (let us know what you’ve done specially here) and apply. You’ll get in with some good essays. The finances are clear as the previous poster said.

I’ll tell you what I told my perfectionist cousin when she was in your position: we need an extra year of a black or Native American or Latino physician far more than we need an extra hundred hours of you working at a food bank or homeless shelter or spending five hundred hours as an ma. Those things are admirable for sure but I could count on one hand the number of my colleagues, young or old, who volunteer significantly outside of their profession.
 
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You should receive several interviews from your target and baseline schools. The reaches are also possible but you will be competing against applicants who have many hundreds or thousands of hours each of clinical and non clinical volunteering/employment.
 
Consider the feedback we give you as a snapshot, like an MCAT diagnostic. You can still improve based on our feedback, so I hope it gives you more confidence in what you can do.

Under current political circumstances, stay connected with the affinity groups. I see scholarship programs (associated with mentoring) posted by many of the organizations offering free MCAT prep and application support. (See nmfonline.org for example.)
 
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