Business to Medicine EC advice

[BusinesstoMedicine]

Hello, a little bit about myself first because I think my situation is fairly unique and I am in the process of making up for a less than stellar undergraduate performance. I graduated in 2019 with a business management degree in the hopes of working for our family business. I graduated with a 2.72cgpa and a 3.41sgpa with a great upward trend in my last year and a half. The gpa’s are fairly low because of one semester in which I screwed up the withdraw process and ended up with a couple F’s. I finished strong and had 4.0 my last 3 semesters in undergrad. I had no extracurriculars aside from coming home and working at the family business over breaks and summers because at this time that was all I had ever considered doing for a career. After graduating I started working full time and not long after that my family including my dad and aunts decided they wanted to sell the business and retire as they had received a great offer. Obviously, this put my brothers and I in an awkward position, but we were very happy for them to do so well on their life’s work. I had saved some money and after some long reflection I decided to pursue a passion with this newfound freedom. I had always taken interest in medicine and having seen some of my friends go through the process I feel like I had a good understanding of what it takes. Now I want to apply to a DO program as I hear they are more open to reinvention. I applied to a post-bacc program at a local 4-year college and now I am 44 credits into the program and have a 4.0 so far and I believe I will end up doing around 30 more credits as I had to finish every prereq.
My current stats for DO school:
3.05cgpa
3.79sgpa
I am hoping that if I keep it up, I will have around a 3.2cgpa and 3.85sgpa when I finish the program. One thing that has been troubling me is my EC's. I have 60 hours of non-clinical volunteering at habitat for humanity since December. I have 30 hours of shadowing total about 15 hours with two doctors. I have been a TA for one semester and hopefully 3 by the time I am done. I am also signed up for some clinical volunteering that starts this summer working with elderly at my local hospital. I volunteered some during my undergrad, but I did not keep track of it in any meaningful way so I feel like including these would not be legitimate. Will my lack of EC’s during my undergrad be something that holds me back? Or will Adcoms understand that all of my free time was dedicated to the business during these years? Should I spend extra years to get my numbers up or is it more about how many hours I am doing per month? Do you have any other advice for EC's? Sorry for the length of this post.

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[m222222]

I’m not an expert but am a nontrad. I think that it’s probably very important for you to seek out significant clinical experience, as schools will want to ensure that you aren’t just pursuing medicine as a second best option but rather as something you have seriously considered, explored, and experienced through shadowing and clinical volunteering. Otherwise, you may be asked why you don’t pursue a different business initiative using your degree. Being able to track the evolution of your desire to pursue medicine, and to point to sustained/meaningful activities to track that evolution, is key. In other words, be sure that your story very clearly says “why medicine” and not “why not business.”

Nonclinical volunteering is also important to demonstrate a genuine commitment to service.

 

[BusinesstoMedicine]

I’m not an expert but am a nontrad. I think that it’s probably very important for you to seek out significant clinical experience, as schools will want to ensure that you aren’t just pursuing medicine as a second best option but rather as something you have seriously considered, explored, and experienced through shadowing and clinical volunteering. Otherwise, you may be asked why you don’t pursue a different business initiative using your degree. Being able to track the evolution of your desire to pursue medicine, and to point to sustained/meaningful activities to track that evolution, is key. In other words, be sure that your story very clearly says “why medicine” and not “why not business.”

Nonclinical volunteering is also important to demonstrate a genuine commitment to service.

Thanks for the advice. Yeah it seems like your story and your reasons for pursuing medicine are a really important part of admissions which makes sense. I certainly need to sit down and figure out how to tell my story.