I am 35 y/o, married and my baby is turning one. Due to the type of work my husband do, we can't relocate so I can only apply to one school (30 min away). Next possible school is two hours away. I'm on the fence whether I should go through all the whole application process just for one school. I'm a RN and GPA 3.6. I love being a nurse but I find myself more intrigued with disease process and treatment plans. I guess an easier route is to become a NP but it's not cardiologist and the pay is way less.
can only apply to one school, should I still attempt?
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Have you taken the med school prereqs? MCAT score?
Have you looked at the matriculant stats at that one school? Number of apps it gets? Instate preference?
Hopefully the answers don't rule you out at that school, but if they do, at least you know where you stand darn quick.
Best of luck to you.
Have you looked at the matriculant stats at that one school? Number of apps it gets? Instate preference?
Hopefully the answers don't rule you out at that school, but if they do, at least you know where you stand darn quick.
Best of luck to you.
There are over 3000 applications for 110 seats last year ...
I think I am more concerned about residency and fellowship since I am also limited to that one school. I want to be a cardiologist but would certainly apply for other specialties. How difficult that is going to be? I just don't want to find out about that after four years and 200K in debt.
thanks.
I think I am more concerned about residency and fellowship since I am also limited to that one school. I want to be a cardiologist but would certainly apply for other specialties. How difficult that is going to be? I just don't want to find out about that after four years and 200K in debt.
thanks.
D
deleted520847
I would suggest applying to the second school too. Maybe you all could move to a midpoint location?
That being said, I would still try. You never know, you might get in.
That being said, I would still try. You never know, you might get in.
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Oh boy.
Cardiology is about 6 years of training after 4 years in med school. You can't specialize in cardiology out of med school. You go after internal medicine, which is what probably 50 of those 110 students match into each year. It's the default specialty for med students who can't decide what they want to do. There are more residency seats in IM than in all but one other specialty (family med). You have to work pretty hard to not match IM. Point being there is absolutely no concern about getting an internal medicine residency, in terms of whether any one med school is competitive, all else being equal (which it's not: you have to get through med school and have good board scores, regardless). If you want to be fantastically prematurely obsessed with whether you can get into the "right" IM residency to position yourself for cardiology fellowship, with no MCAT score in hand, take that over to pre-allo where rampant speculation based on nothing is the whole point of the subforum.
In other words, it's completely out of proportion to be worrying about residency and fellowship at this point. That's a hurdle after these hurdles:
1. Get the med school prereqs done with better than 3.6 (med school prereqs are generally not the same, and are generally harder, than nursing science). Very difficult because the med school prereqs are a graveyard of champions.
2. Get a good MCAT score. Another graveyard of champions.
3. Don't blow your marriage. Seriously.
4. Somehow get accepted with only one school on your list. Very low odds.
5. Survive the first 2 years of med school. This is the 2nd most miserable part of medical training for most people. (Most miserable, typically: intern year of residency.)
6. Get a good Step 1 score. Another graveyard of champions.
7. Do much better than just surviving 3rd year. Fun fact: you don't get honors in 3rd year rotations without having already been at the top of your class.
8. Get a good Step 2 score. A slightly less spooky graveyard.
1. Can't get A's in the prereqs
2. After all the work of the prereqs, can't get a good MCAT score
3. After all the work of the prereqs & MCAT, can't get an acceptance
4. After all the work of getting in, can't survive 1st semester anatomy
5. After all the work of surviving 1st & 2nd year, blow Step 1
$200k is a low estimate. If you will be borrowing cost of attendance, $250k is the current average. And rising.
Clearly you're trying to be pragmatic and make a very solid decision to do right by your family. But you aren't up to speed on the issues that would let you actually be pragmatic and make a solid decision. I would expect that you will find the pragmatic, solid decision is "nope". You can get to nope without doing the work to understand what you're getting into with med school, or you can do the work. Your gut reaction to being told "give up now" is also good information.
Nobody is going to be able to give you a valid answer to "should I even be considering this?" You are in an SDN subforum that is full-to-busting with commentary from people who have tried to do what you want to do. There are a bazillion parents, nurses, and location-bound former premeds here on SDN, if you choose to do the work to research this extremely difficult, expensive and lengthy career change.
Best of luck to you.
That's below average. But the point of the exercise was to see if there's a fast "yes" answer to "is your one and only school WAY too competitive for this plan?" And the answer is no. Which leaves harder questions.
This says you don't know how residency works. Which is fine, but as a nurse you should have access to doctors, preferably fresh ones, and you should be using them as mentors. You need a sense of proportion, and perspective, and prioritization for your concerns.
Cardiology is about 6 years of training after 4 years in med school. You can't specialize in cardiology out of med school. You go after internal medicine, which is what probably 50 of those 110 students match into each year. It's the default specialty for med students who can't decide what they want to do. There are more residency seats in IM than in all but one other specialty (family med). You have to work pretty hard to not match IM. Point being there is absolutely no concern about getting an internal medicine residency, in terms of whether any one med school is competitive, all else being equal (which it's not: you have to get through med school and have good board scores, regardless). If you want to be fantastically prematurely obsessed with whether you can get into the "right" IM residency to position yourself for cardiology fellowship, with no MCAT score in hand, take that over to pre-allo where rampant speculation based on nothing is the whole point of the subforum.
In other words, it's completely out of proportion to be worrying about residency and fellowship at this point. That's a hurdle after these hurdles:
1. Get the med school prereqs done with better than 3.6 (med school prereqs are generally not the same, and are generally harder, than nursing science). Very difficult because the med school prereqs are a graveyard of champions.
2. Get a good MCAT score. Another graveyard of champions.
3. Don't blow your marriage. Seriously.
4. Somehow get accepted with only one school on your list. Very low odds.
5. Survive the first 2 years of med school. This is the 2nd most miserable part of medical training for most people. (Most miserable, typically: intern year of residency.)
6. Get a good Step 1 score. Another graveyard of champions.
7. Do much better than just surviving 3rd year. Fun fact: you don't get honors in 3rd year rotations without having already been at the top of your class.
8. Get a good Step 2 score. A slightly less spooky graveyard.
That's a good thing to be worried about, but again, what's more critically at stake is the following stereotypical problems:
1. Can't get A's in the prereqs
2. After all the work of the prereqs, can't get a good MCAT score
3. After all the work of the prereqs & MCAT, can't get an acceptance
4. After all the work of getting in, can't survive 1st semester anatomy
5. After all the work of surviving 1st & 2nd year, blow Step 1
$200k is a low estimate. If you will be borrowing cost of attendance, $250k is the current average. And rising.
Clearly you're trying to be pragmatic and make a very solid decision to do right by your family. But you aren't up to speed on the issues that would let you actually be pragmatic and make a solid decision. I would expect that you will find the pragmatic, solid decision is "nope". You can get to nope without doing the work to understand what you're getting into with med school, or you can do the work. Your gut reaction to being told "give up now" is also good information.
Nobody is going to be able to give you a valid answer to "should I even be considering this?" You are in an SDN subforum that is full-to-busting with commentary from people who have tried to do what you want to do. There are a bazillion parents, nurses, and location-bound former premeds here on SDN, if you choose to do the work to research this extremely difficult, expensive and lengthy career change.
Best of luck to you.
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Even if you got into that one med school, that doesn't mean you'll get into an IM program in the same area. Getting "an" IM residency isn't that hard for a US grad. Getting a specific residency might be a lot harder. If the guy that interviews you puts you below a bunch of people that also want that spot, you have just wasted four years of your life. You must be geographically flexible to go into medicine. Most of us moved at least once, if not twice. That's just the way it works.
Thanks everyone for the input! I did a little search and figured that I could expand the radius to two hours drive, then I can apply for four schools and about 8 if it's 3.5 hrs drive. Wish I had done this 10 years earlier 
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Thanks everyone for the input! I did a little search and figured that I could expand the radius to two hours drive, then I can apply for four schools and about 8 if it's 3.5 hrs drive. Wish I had done this 10 years earlier
Just one question though: will you commute everyday? Anything more than a 1.5 hours commute everyday will get really rough.
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You say you wish you had done this 10 years ago. Well you don't want to have the same thought ten years from now. If you can start heading down the premed path right now, then do it. Maybe you'll hit obstacles and delays down the road but you'll get past them and at least you'll be closer to your goal.
my hubby said we can move to a mid point, so 1 hr drive is doable. If it's 3.5 hours, I only can go home during the weekend. This is going to suck for four years. So I think I'll apply for the four schools two hours away then expand the radius for residency and fellowship if I'm desperate by then. But first of all, I still have two more prerequisites to do and MCAT to take. Thanks and best luck to everyone.
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I'm still on the fence, because I've got 4 semesters of prereqs to take before I can apply, so I wouldn't be headed to med school until Fall 2018. But I'm in the same boat. I'm 32 years old, with a husband, three small children, and a successful career. I'm not willing to uproot my family to go to med school somewhere else, so I'm only applying to one (if I decide to go for it at all). Now, assuming that my prereq grades and MCAT are good (which I have no reason to believe they would not be), my sources at the med school in question assure me that I can bank on getting in, and my doctor sources assure me that I will have no trouble getting a residency in town, even if not in my first choice of specialty. I think based on what I have been told that it is possible to go t med school, get through residency, and actually practice medicine all in one town. But it depends on (1) the student and (2) the town.
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I think the general thought is to buy as many "lottery tickets" as you can, unless you get accepted into a program like one of Temple's--and then you maintain their requirements for their sGPA and MCAT %. Others like Tulane may be helpful, but not as strong as a direct access, but like linkages to interview. (Don't know where you are located, and it's best to keep your anonymity.)
So that is all dependent on a very good to great whole application and then interview.
Keep plugging away at making your application great, volunteering, enjoying your family, and working. If you are done with your pre-reqs, take some higher level relevant science courses if you'd like.
Cardiology is a long path, and personally, I'd want to do peds & adult cards. At this point, and given the competitiveness, and the fact that I really do enjoy all ages of people--but especially peds--I don't think it's the right path for me--even having worked in it as an RN. Life goes by quickly. I see me as a tethered eagle. The idealist wants to soar, but the pragmatist sees the reality.
You could do NP and then go into cardiology. We work with critical care peds NPs that cover in the children's hospitals and that focus on cards kids--medical and surgical cards peds. It's not a bad role; but it's more like they function as eternal residents to the CT surgeon and such. If you are good with that, well, many of them make >$100,000 per year. Also, the reality is that no one ever really works in a vacuum for the most part--at least not in academic centers. There are always other people to whom one must answer, regardless of whether one is a DO or MD. Rural FM is probably most autonomous, but then they sure as heck better know quickly when something is far outside of their element and stabilize and move.
Enjoy your family and take some time to really think about what you want and how to progress. Never regret time spent with your children. It's a pretty awesome responsibility and close contact over time is high yield in their lives. You only really get one chance at that, and falling short in that role in someway will hurt much more than delaying any professional role.
In answer to your question, sure you can apply to one school; but w/o a sure-click linkage, like Temple, and who knows if that is tight as it used to be, your probability is low. But who knows? You may win the lottery? I mean I know of people that lived in ND, who applied only to UND and gained acceptance.
Best wishes to you whatever you decide.
So that is all dependent on a very good to great whole application and then interview.
Keep plugging away at making your application great, volunteering, enjoying your family, and working. If you are done with your pre-reqs, take some higher level relevant science courses if you'd like.
Cardiology is a long path, and personally, I'd want to do peds & adult cards. At this point, and given the competitiveness, and the fact that I really do enjoy all ages of people--but especially peds--I don't think it's the right path for me--even having worked in it as an RN. Life goes by quickly. I see me as a tethered eagle. The idealist wants to soar, but the pragmatist sees the reality.
You could do NP and then go into cardiology. We work with critical care peds NPs that cover in the children's hospitals and that focus on cards kids--medical and surgical cards peds. It's not a bad role; but it's more like they function as eternal residents to the CT surgeon and such. If you are good with that, well, many of them make >$100,000 per year. Also, the reality is that no one ever really works in a vacuum for the most part--at least not in academic centers. There are always other people to whom one must answer, regardless of whether one is a DO or MD. Rural FM is probably most autonomous, but then they sure as heck better know quickly when something is far outside of their element and stabilize and move.
Enjoy your family and take some time to really think about what you want and how to progress. Never regret time spent with your children. It's a pretty awesome responsibility and close contact over time is high yield in their lives. You only really get one chance at that, and falling short in that role in someway will hurt much more than delaying any professional role.
In answer to your question, sure you can apply to one school; but w/o a sure-click linkage, like Temple, and who knows if that is tight as it used to be, your probability is low. But who knows? You may win the lottery? I mean I know of people that lived in ND, who applied only to UND and gained acceptance.
Best wishes to you whatever you decide.
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Not to hijack your thread but I guess I'm sort of in the same boat (at least temporarily). I have a domicile restriction of moving my kids out of the tricounty area and they wont both be graduated until 2019. This leaves me only UNT HSC (15% acceptance rate) and UT Southwestern (10%). I need to do my prereq's and MCAT, putting my initial application period ~ 2018. Both are state schools and I'll be applying under the academic fresh start, putting my current undergrad GPA at 3.93 (Science 4.0). As an in-state student, should I be hopeful for either of these schools as long as I get an MCAT score above the median for both? I'll be honest, my EC's at the moment are basically non-existent, but I'm working on changing that. I am a veteran and currently the CTO of a software company with a multi-million annual revenue, though I don't know if that part of my CV even means anything to adcoms. Planning on adding hospice and clinic volunteering to my EC's in the next month or two, so I will have at least a couple years of EC's by the time I apply.
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Quick question for you- what is the academic fresh start?
I am assuming you are a TX resident? Being a Veteran is very favorably looked upon by ADCOMs by the way
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Quick question for you- what is the academic fresh start?
I am assuming you are a TX resident? Being a Veteran is very favorably looked upon by ADCOMs by the way
Something I actually only recent found out about thanks to SDN. In Texas, if you attend a state school, you can basically throw out all the grades that are > 10 years old. You can't pick and choose and you lose the credit for them but at least you don't have to suffer for them any longer, lol. Then, when applying to a state graduate school, only those grades newer than 10 years are used to calculate your undergraduate GPA. In my case, because of my failure to confirm my withdrawal from classes prior to leaving for the military, I ended up with a semester of all F's. Added to that was off campus credit I rec'd for my military MOS from GWU, which I had zero control of (basically, if u completed the training, u got a "B" no matter how good or bad u did). According to my academic summary report from LSAC, this reduces my cumulative GPA down to a 3.57, hence my reason for wanting to participate in the academic fresh start program. I know it won't help me for private schools or out of state schools, but since both schools that I'm interested in are Texas state schools, it seems to make really good sense to redo some basic courses, especially since I have zero undergrad debt.
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That sounds AWESOME! I was actually just curious. Thanks (and I wish I lived in Texas!)
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