Bored from quarantine? Pls help a senior looking to apply :)

[aperson342394]

a senior looking for school list help!! Tysm!! I am scared and need advice!

Hi!!



I’m currently a senior in college and attempting to apply this cycle. My dream locale to live in has been NYC (or at least close to NYC) for the past four years now, and I’m hoping to make good on that goal but I don’t feel like I’m competitive enough. Can anyone give me insight on NYC schools (as well as schools in general) I could try to apply to and maybe get into? Or, how can I make myself more competitive?



PROFILE: -Sex: F -ORM -GPA: 3.65 -sGPA:3.7 -MCAT: First time: 503 (127/124/126/125), second time: 512 (127/128/129/128) - ECs:



-300 hrs clinical with varied experiences volunteering as an EMT, hospital volunteering, and free clinic work



-400 hrs research over 2 labs, 1 poster presentation



-1000 hours non clinical: extensive leadership where I basically helped to run a soup kitchen and provided medical care + other resources to the homeless and underserved. I was president of a campus organization that volunteered here and helped grow it a ton. We raised over $9,000 to keep these dinners going.

Other non clinical experiences include was a camp counselor for kids whose parents have cancer, and also tutored and coached minority kids from underprivileged backgrounds



-600 hours as a general chemistry TA for students from underserved backgrounds



-100 hrs shadowing in gynecology, internal medicine, critical care, and oncology



LOR: all good, id say they’re strong



I have a strong story to tell as well since I’ve been through some real stuff to get where I am today. How far will all of this take me though? Also—how badly will the fact that I’m an mcat retaker affect me?



Schools on my list so far (looking to increase this to around 20-25 schools. To make this list I basically looked at schools on MSAR that fit my mcat and gpa and put em on the list:



-ALL IL schools (except uchicago and northwestern)

-U of Iowa Carver College of Med

-Albert Einstein college of med

-SUNY downstate

-Mt Sinai school of medicine (I know this is a super far reach but this is my dream school so I’m just thinking of applying for the heck of it, it’s my only far reach though)

-SLU, Creighton, all the Jesuit schools bc ik they look favorably on volunteering and I have a lot of that-

-Wayne state

-EVMS

-seton hall

-Geisinger commonwealth

-GWU

-Drexel

-OUWB

-Hofstra





THANK YOU SO MUCH!! Please stay safe, everyone!

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[little_giant]

State of residence? Any reason specifically why you want NYC? What makes Mt Sinai the dream school?

 

[aperson342394]

State of residence? Any reason specifically why you want NYC? What makes Mt Sinai the dream school?

State of residence: IL
Why I want NYC: It is a big beautiful bustling city, I really would love to go to school in a huge city and I’ve lived near Chicago all my life so I don’t want to live in Chicago. I just have a deep love for NYC and would love to live there one day. I realize that I shouldn’t base all my hopes on it for med school and I have the rest of my life to go live there but I figured itd be worth a shot
Mt Sinai: Have friends that interviewed there and heard all about it and its various programs, the vibe of the school as well as its student orgs and curriculum make me really like it.

This all might sound a little naive, I’ll admit. But yeah there you have it haha.

 

[JasonG12]

Overall, I’d say your application looks good! You’ve checked off all the boxes and sound like a well-rounded applicant.

My only worry is that there doesn’t seem to be much of a theme across your activities. Your clinical volunteering activities are all varied with what looks like relatively low numbers of hours. You’ve spent 400 hours in 2 different labs. Are the labs related to each other or to your teaching assistant role in chemistry? How does the soup kitchen relate to any of your other activities? You mentioned that you have overcome adversity to get to where you are today. Does your story adequately reference the activities you’ve pursued?

Additionally, your mcat retake is good because you saw a large increase, but many schools still consider all attempts/an average of attempts. I’d advise you to apply to around 35-40 schools including some DO schools and stress your personal narrative above all else right now.

 

[little_giant]

State of residence: IL
Why I want NYC: It is a big beautiful bustling city, I really would love to go to school in a huge city and I’ve lived near Chicago all my life so I don’t want to live in Chicago. I just have a deep love for NYC and would love to live there one day. I realize that I shouldn’t base all my hopes on it for med school and I have the rest of my life to go live there but I figured itd be worth a shot
Mt Sinai: Have friends that interviewed there and heard all about it and its various programs, the vibe of the school as well as its student orgs and curriculum make me really like it.

This all might sound a little naive, I’ll admit. But yeah there you have it haha.

New York sure is bustling alright haha.
If you expand your radius a bit you can still be within a bus ride to NYC and go there for a daytrip.
NYMC is literally less than an hour away, the NJ schools (Rutgers x2, Seton Hall), some Philly schools (it'll be like a 2hr bus ride or train). Stony Brook even though you're not in-state might still send u an II

 

[A_Knowbody]

I agree with what @JasonG12 advice.

Consider adding more mid-low tier private MDs
- Albany
- Frank H. Netter
- Temple
- MCW
- NYMC
- Tulane
- Miami
- Wake Forest
- CNU / CSOM if interested in Cali - but may be difficult to match on the East Coast / NYC

A handful of DOs
- Include NYITCOM, located in NYC.

 

[aperson342394]

Overall, I’d say your application looks good! You’ve checked off all the boxes and sound like a well-rounded applicant.

My only worry is that there doesn’t seem to be much of a theme across your activities. Your clinical volunteering activities are all varied with what looks like relatively low numbers of hours. You’ve spent 400 hours in 2 different labs. Are the labs related to each other or to your teaching assistant role in chemistry? How does the soup kitchen relate to any of your other activities? You mentioned that you have overcome adversity to get to where you are today. Does your story adequately reference the activities you’ve pursued?

Additionally, your mcat retake is good because you saw a large increase, but many schools still consider all attempts/an average of attempts. I’d advise you to apply to around 35-40 schools including some DO schools and stress your personal narrative above all else right now.

Thank you for the thoughtful response!

Yeah, so I can see that my application definitely seems a bit box checky.

I’ll include a tl;dr up here: I come from a really toxic family situation, and one instance of this is where basically noone believed in me and everyone thought I would never make it, and I really had to fight for what I wanted (ex: people actively did not like that I wanted to be a doctor bc they wanted me to get married asap, lowkey tried to arrange my marriage which I got out of lol, so I kinda had to forge my own way a little bit).

Throughout college i realized that I loved this profession because I can use it in order to advocate for people in similar sucky situations—life could be totally working against them and prevent them from living a good quality of life. I had a pediatrician advocate for me multiple times to get me what I needed when I was really bad off. People sometimes need a helping hand. This could be due to physical problems, economic hardship, and so much more. As a doctor I can speak up for underserved populations and allow them to live the life they deserve. IPlus I also love medicine and the human body, it is so interesting yadda yadda which is why Im also a biology major.


Throughout college I really invested a ton of my time into my non-clinical volunteering. It made me super happy and it taught me so many life skills and influenced my passion for medicine. I believe because I had so much of this, I had less of the other things. I just really loved doing it, so I kinda just kept doing it haha. Soup kitchen helped me learn about underserved poplns and how to advocate for them.

I remained a bit vague in the post for sake of anonymity, but my goal throughout college was to try and do things to help the people that needed it the most, i.e. the underserved/medically underserved, and also gather the knowledge and the skills to do as much as I can for the people I’m helping. I started out volunteering at a hospital freshman year (50hrs), and hated it so I got my EMT certification that next summer, and for the rest of college, I volunteered at my schools EMT squad (~150 hrs). While I was volunteering here, I realized I really wanted to do free clinic work, however there were none that I could find around me. The next year I did indeed find one and have been volunteering solely there at present (100hrs). The problem with the free clinic was that I was unable to accrue a large amount of hours, however I do have some good stories to tell and meaningful patient interaction as well (I triaged patients and was able to spend a good amount of time with them talking to them about their needs and taking vitals and getting them where they need to go). These interaction helped solidify what I can do as a medical provider to help the populations i want to help.

With research, I do think I was way too box checky, and that’s somethng I regret. My school is huge for research, and so soph year I decided “hm lets try this out” and emailed the first lab I could find and got in. It ended up being a really toxic environment so I left, and found a clinical research lab focusing on Dialysis patients. I really really love this lab and was able to interact with patients and help them out, while also helping my grad students with studies and learning about these patients diets and the hardships they face while battling end stage renal disease. Sadly however, my time in lab has gotten cut short due to COVID-19, and I won‘t be in lab with the patients for the rest of the semester. Research again showed me that there are a lot of people that need medical help, and there are so so many factors that can influence their care and progression of disease. It taught me to really think closely about all the different things a patientmight face and their interconnectedness. It made me way more passionate about serving the medically underserved.


CHEM TA: This was a job that I really just wanted to do for the heck of it. I really loved how I could make a difference in the lives of students that came from less privileged backgrounds. Many of my kids deal with a ton of **** that leads to things like a lack of self belief and less resources than the fancy pants private school kids and I just wanna be there for them and help them shine. I suppose this ties in with my mission for advocacy and stuff. I love breaking down big boi concepts into easily digestible bulletpoints and I think this skill would really help me as a physician, as I’ve observed the physicians I’ve shadowed do these similar things in consultation rooms. I’ve seen a lot of overlap between the role of a physician adn the role of a TA and practicing and loving these overlap skills confirms to me that I want to be in this profession, if that makes sense.

 

[aperson342394]

I agree with what @JasonG12 advice.

Consider adding more mid-low tier private MDs
- Albany
- Frank H. Netter
- Temple
- MCW
- NYMC
- Tulane
- Miami
- Wake Forest
- CNU / CSOM if interested in Cali - but may be difficult to match on the East Coast / NYC

A handful of DOs
- Include NYITCOM, located in NYC.

thank you so much!! Will add these to my list.

 

[aperson342394]

Bumping this!

 

[FutureSurgical]

Add VCU and UTHSC to your list as well

 

[aperson342394]

Will do, hopefully they are OOS friendly enough to accept me haha