Advise needed. Please help.

[medicineAAA3]

Hello everyone, after a long time and much consideration I have finally decided that medicine was my calling. My situation is that I am an URM male who also came to the states as a refugee and speak multiple languages fluently. It took me 7.5 years to get a bachelor's degree and this is mostly due to the fact that I worked full time throughout all of this. Currently I have a molecular and cellular biology. I switched majors and fields of study so many times that the first four years my GPA was a 2.4 and after much consideration, I started taking pre-med courses in which I now have a sGPA of 3.4 and a cGPA of 3.2. I also worked in a hospital for 3 years and have over 5 years of volunteering and 1.5 years of research. If anyone can give me any insight on what my chances are would be greatly appreciated. And what sorts of schools should I think of applying to. I have not taken the MCAT yet.. Thanks in advance for your guys inputs. Will start application process in 2019.

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[HomeSkool]

Looks like you've made up a lot of ground with the GPA recovery so far. Good job! My advice for now is to take some additional BCPM courses and continue pushing that GPA up, and to focus on preparing for the MCAT. Once you have a score, people will be in a better position to advise you. Off the top of my head, I'd be thinking about my state MD school(s) and DO programs if I were you.

Can you break down your volunteering activities and provide an estimate of the number of hours devoted to each? Also, have you done any shadowing?

 

[medicineAAA3]

Looks like you've made up a lot of ground with the goods recovery so far. Good job! My advice for now is to take some additional BCPM courses and continue pushing that GPA up, and to focus on preparing for the MCAT. Once you have a score, people will be in a better position to advise you. Off the top of my head, I'd be thinking about my state MD school(s) and DO programs if I were you.

Can you break down your volunteering activities and provide an estimate of the number of hours devoted to each? Also, have you done any shadowing?

Thank you for your response. As far as volunteering goes, I have two main categories. First one which is significant to me is I volunteered with a refugee resettlement agency for the past three years and the hours for that totals out to be roughly around 1300 hours. The other one which I also volunteered was at a sunday school for underprivileged children and I did this for about 2 years for a total of roughly 900 hours. A significant portion of my application would be my full time employment at a local hospital. I also did other small volunteering around the community but those were not always continuous. I also have a lot of primary care doctor shadowing which totals out to be 250 hours for the past year and a half. Please let me know if there is anything else I should do to try and strengthen my app.

 

[gyngyn]

You can stop shadowing now. 40 hours (especially primary care) is plenty.