About to graduate with MPH but still have a desire for medical school

[monkeym8]

hey there!

my name is Kevin and I have an interesting dilemma...

about myself: child of immigrants who escaped the khmer rouge, have a hearing loss, ADHD, and grew up in a rural community. have shadowed derm, ent, family

I graduated from a top public university in 2019 with a BS in Public Health. I already took all my prereqs (cGPA: 3.48; sGPA: 3.29; moderate upward trend) I was supposed to take the MCAT that summer but life got in the way.

I then worked at small clinic as a patient care coordinator before enrolling in an MPH program (healthcare mgmt) at an Ivy League. My initial reasoning for wanting to pursue an MPH was I wanted to impact a larger scale and have a more policy driven focus towards health inequities. From my internship experiences at health systems, I realized that I don't want to be crunching numbers and primarily working in an office setting. I want the ability to develop meaningful relationships with patients and play a direct role in their health. I also can't stand the long lead time between interventions and outcomes...

Given that I am about to graduate this May, I was thinking about taking my MCAT in August. Do y'all think that I should retake my med school prereqs to work on the sGPA? What else should I do during these next two years as I prepare my application? Also, does anyone understand how loan forgiveness programs work? If I pursued an MD, and made 120 consecutive payments, would my MPH loans be forgiven as well?

Thank you!

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[Dral]

I don't think re-taking courses in an attempt to mainly raise your GPA is a good idea. The cost to benefit ratio is too great imo. You could consider a post bacc (or possibly SMP) just to prove that you can handle the rigors of multiple upper level science courses simultaneously.

You look to be in solid range of DO schools and maybe some MD schools with your current situation. I think taking your MCAT will give more information about where you stand. If you can get a 510 or above, I think you're on solid ground (but a 500 to 509 wouldn't necessarily exclude you from med school of course).

How many hours of recent shadowing do you have? Also, what do you have in terms of research, clinical/non-clinical volunteering, and other activities?

 

[monkeym8]

Shadowing hours:

• 50 PCP
• 15 ENT
• 15 Dermatology

Research

• NSF REU summer 2018
• Public Health project from Jan 2018-May 2018
• Public Health project from Jan 2018-Oct 2018
• No publications have come out of these however

Extra curricular

• Volunteered at local hospital from 2017-2019.
• Worked at a dermatology clinic from 2019-2020 as a patient care coordinator
• Part of a student-run group to ensure care for local residents from 2020-2021 (grad school)
• Co-President of American Healthcare Exec club in graduate school.
• Did an internship in spring 2021 to help the health system create a benchmarking report to develop a health equity strategy
• did another internship in summer 2021 in value-based care dept where i developed quality metric dashboard to help monitor performance in Value-based contracts

 

[Dral]

That looks good. I would keep up the non-clinical and clinical volunteering over the next two years. Continuing to shadow couldn't hurt either.