Fork in the Road

[nhazu10]

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Hello fellow URMs,
So if any of you have taken a quick look on the aamc website and look at the statistics, they look promising. That being said, if you take a URM with a 3.2-3.4 and an MCAT score of 30-32, 74% of applicants were accepted into medical school. Now, this is my dilemma. I currently have a science gpa of 3.11 and a cum of 3.23. Yah I know not that great. I've done volunteered hours and what not. My extracurriculars are pretty darn good... I founded and was president of the minority association for pre-medical students on my campus (I hope that helps) and I was accepted into UCSD MSTP SURF which was a summer program for URMs as well. I also have about a year of research on my back. So here's my question, I'm currently taking a year off but I dont want to just do nothing with this year off, that doesn't look good. So I'm hoping I score a research job. Now, do I stay with this research job, take the MCAT in the spring, apply in June, then hope I get into med school? OR do I apply to a post-bacc to raise my GPA here in california (they have post-baccs just for urms) and do that for a year then apply after thats all done which would be June 2012.

Thoughts?

 

[cali-ob]

Post pac. You can try to do some research at the same time if possible, but I'd do the post bac and work on boosting the GPA.

 

[klm84]

osteopathic an option for you?

 

[nhazu10]

possibly. i want to get into a profession that does clincal work along with research. that being said, i know that limits be some specific fields. at the end of the day i think its all problem solving manifested in different fields. if your good at problem solving, IMHO, you'll do fine in any profession. in regards to salary, i hope to have a larger family (4-5) so money may be of concern, meaning a higher salary field would be of more interest. osteopathic medicine definately has its perks, and i like its approach to health care. I think many MD's can take a more than a page or two out of osteopathic medicine. another question, are there salary differences b/w osteo and allopathic?

 

[klm84]

because osetopathic physicians and allopathic physicians can do all of the same specialties, I'm sure that two physicians paid in a specialized field at the same place would be paid the same. However, a DO student would need to score well on standardized tests and most likely take both COMPLEX and USMLE exams and probably want to go the route of choosing an allopathic residency to be competitive for difficult residincies

However, in primary care I have heard that an osteopathic physician who regularly performs OMM on patients can earn double the salary of a primary care doc that does not do OMM 👍 (heard from 2nd yr DO student, who got info from a medical billing class)