What schools should I apply to?
2.9 c GPA
2.7 s GPA
30 mcat
SOCIAL SCIENCE MAJOR, biology and chem minors
Volunteer experience
Great LORS
Started my own non profit
Thanks everyone 🙂
First, get the idea of applying this year out of your head. Your stats are too low and you'd be throwing your money away. That being said, you can get into medical school eventaully, if you want to.
Anyway, I've been where you are are this is what I'd do. This advice is going to look like a book, though, please read it through.
Motivation:
1) This IS a fixable GPA, if you have the dedication and talent to turn this around. This is coming from someone who graduated in a similar situation (2.8 cum and BCPM with about 200 credits).
2) Whether it's cost and time effective depends on your opportunity cost (your lifestyle if you started working now), how quickly you can turn this around, and how you value the reward (becoming a doctor). Again, you're not getting in this year. This will probably be at least a 2 year, full time process.
Now as to HOW you turn this around?
the basics (will take about a year):
1) You need to figure out why you got the 2.9 in the first place. Without this, nothing else matters. Are you ADHD and need meds? Did you have a crisis that tanked your grades? Were you lazy in a fixable way? Do you have a problem with substance use? Was it really just taking care of your Dad, and if so is there a reason you no longer need to take care of him? Of course if the problem is that you're just a very type B personality, or that memorzing and regurgitating facts isn't your particular talent, this might be where your journey ends.
2) Once you've figured out what went wrong, you need to go get a GPA of 3.0, and ideally a 3.2 (both BCPM and cumulative). It's very difficult to get around this. So you need to sign up to take more college classes. You can go back to your old college and beg for a second major, or you can start taking community college classes. They key here is that QUALITY DOESN'T MATTER, all you need right now is numbers. Take easy classes with stupid people.
3) You may want a new MCAT score. The MCAT score is what is going to determine how long it's going to take you to turn this around. if it's really high (33+) you could theoreticcally get in within a year. Also note that med schools do see ALL your MCAT scores and a bad score digs you a deeper hole, so don't take the test if until you get the score you want on a practice test (ideally on two). If you go from a 30 to a 26 you really shoot yourself in the foot.
Alright so you've got the basics, where do you go from here?
High MCAT score (>33):
Congrats, you might get into medical school only 2 years after graduting (the national average). You now need to apply to a program called a 'special masters program'. These are programs, hosted by a handful of medical schools, which allow you to take medical school classes and to be graded against medical school students. They are expensive and stressful, but students who do well in well known SMPs have almost a 100% success rate getting into medical school. SDN explains these programs further
in the postbac forum. Like medical school, SMPs turn away a lot of applicants, so you need a high MCAT and the 3.0 to get in, and you need to apply broadly to get into one program. Be aware that a program is only as good as its reputation/linkage, and some SMPs are really just money generating scams, so do your research before you apply. It MIGHT be worth it to apply to SMPs this summer, if you can use the summer semester to get your cGPA over a 3.0. The application fees are low, and if you do really well in an SMP after getting a 3.0 I think you might get in during the following application cycle with no further work. If you get rejected from all the good SMPs it's not too much money lost.
Average (27-33) MCAT: This is doable, but you need a higher GPA. A 3.3 (at the minimum), followed by a broad application focused on DO schools and maybe a few low end allopathic schools. It's important to note that DO schools only look at your most recent grade from a class (grade replacement) so retake and Fs, Ds, or Cs you've gotten and watch your GPA rise twice as fast. Shadow a couple of of DOs, ideally at least one who practices OMM, and show a lot of interest in their philosophy.
Low <27 MCAT: Sorry you bombed the retake. Retake the MCAT again or quit.
Things NOT to do:
Do NOT go to the Caribbean: The Caribbean has, over the past decade, progressed from being a legitimate last resort to being a scam. The issue is that Caribbean schools don't participate in the match, so their students get to fight for whatever is left over after all the US medical students matched. In the past that was actually a lot of residency spots, but medical schools (especially DO schools) have expanded a LOT recently and now there aren't nearly as many spots to fight over. So the Caribbean schools are taking huge amounts of money from gullible students who probably couldn't even pass the boards, and then only tell them part way through that they need to KILL the USMLE and outperform medical students on their rotations to match into anything at all. Everyone else gets failed out, or doesn't match, and is left with no career and 200K+ of nondischargable debt.
Do NOT enroll in any kind of traditional masters, JD, MPH, or PhD program: Unless you've given up on medical school, that is. The experience of posters on this board, backed up by our ADCOM members, is that any post-graduate program other than an SMP is 100% useless for redeeming a GPA as low as yours. A masters might be a good start to your new career, but it won't help at all with medicine.
For futher advice I would recommend reading through SDN's
low GPA thread in the postbac forum. It's full of generations of SDN's premedical f- ups (like me) discussing their strategies to beat the odds.
Good luck
