How to improve my application?

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rukia013

Jeremiah 29:11-13
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I am currently waitlisted at 3 schools with 0 acceptances so I am starting to think about reapplying possibly during the 2017-2018 cycle. The trouble is that I am not sure how to go about improving my application--the biggest thing I can think of is my 3.6 GPA/32 MCAT since I feel that my application's ECs are pretty well-rounded (hundreds of clinical and non-clinical hours).

All of my ECs+hours are listed in my MDapps as well as all the schools I have applied to (http://www.mdapplicants.com/profile.php?id=30930). I graduated with a degree in Molecular Toxicology so I did not do any research during college since research was already a big part of the curriculum.

At the moment I am thinking of applying to post-bacc programs to improve my GPA but if you guys think that my application should be improved in a different way, please let me know!

(Basically right now I am trying to narrow down what was possibly wrong with my app--if it's not my stats or ECs, then maybe it was my PS or interview skills, etc. Let me know if you want to look at my PS/AMCAS EC descriptions)

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Your application looks fine.
Your list was not tailored to your application, though. Unless you are a gifted writer and started writing secondaries the year before, I can only suspect that the secondaries were so-so.
With three waitlists, there may have also been some communcation or interpersonal barrier to your success. Hopefully one of the waitlists may still bear fruit.
 
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Your application looks fine.
Your list was not tailored to your application, though. Unless you are a gifted writer and started writing secondaries the year before, I can only suspect that the secondaries were so-so.
With three waitlists, there may have also been some communcation or interpersonal barrier to your success, but one of them may still bear fruit.
Thanks for the feedback! Since you think my application itself seems fine, would you recommend that I apply again for the upcoming cycle (2016-2017) or wait for the 2017-2018 cycle? (I graduated in 2014 so I am already in my second gap year).
 
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Thanks for the feedback! Since you think my application itself seems fine, would you recommend that I apply again for the upcoming cycle (2016-2017) or wait for the 2017-2018 cycle? (I graduated in 2014 so I am already in my second gap year).
It's always better to identify and address the reason for the undesired outcome.
You are the only one with information about your secondaries, their quality and timeliness.
How did the interviews go? When did you get them?
You will be a re-applicant at a lot of schools that will now be looking for improvements.
I have offered some likely problems. Am I right? How will you improve them?
 
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The problem here is you are a reapplicant at so many schools if you have to reapply. Your application is fine on paper; most likely the devil's in the details and presentation of yourself. So there isnt necessairly an easy fix to your issues; it's not simply "apply broader" "get clinical expererience" or "get more service" as are often the issues.

For schools you are a reapplicant at, for many of them they will pull your previous application up and compare the new and the old if they are realistically considering you. The standard theyll hold you to is you have to have improved your app to a fairly noticeable degree at the least; minor changes and tweaks wont work.

So if the main issue is "poor secondary responses" or "bad interviewer" it's not easy to sell that those have just magically improved in 12 months; the key here is the bad taste a poor secondary or poor interview from a previous cycle might leave is still a very real issue even for a reapplicant. One reason why some schools are less likely to reinterview applicants is because communication and interviewing skills are seen as difficult to improve in just one year. That's why it's somewhat tricky to try and give advice here.

Best thing I can say is call the schools that waitlisted you for feedback if you dont get in this cycle. While I dont think its all that likely they identify a readily fixable issue for you such as "lack of clinical experience" it isnt out of the realm of possibility and if they do that at least gives you a solid starting direction to go.
 
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It's always better to identify and address the reason for the undesired outcome.
You are the only one with information about your secondaries, their quality and timeliness.
How did the interviews go? When did you get them?
You will be a re-applicant at a lot of schools that will now be looking for improvements.
I have offered some likely problems. Am I right? How will you improve them?
I do suspect that there was something off about my secondary responses but when I look through my answers, there isn't anything that jumps out to me like "Oh, I should have written that better, etc." Granted, I didn't get a second opinion on my secondary essays and I'm not the most eloquent writer, but I felt that I did a pretty decent job of answering the question and providing example(s) and discussing key things that I learned that I felt would show that I am well suited for a career in medicine. If you would like to take a look, I can PM a snippet of one of my responses to one of the more common questions asked just to see if there is something in my responses that I am not catching.

My first interview at my state school was actually on the first day of that school's interview season and my other interviews were in December/January. I felt that my interviews went well; I had gone over my responses with my parents following my last interview and they thought I had given well-thought-out answers to the questions.

At the moment I am still considering applying to some 1-year post-bacc masters programs to improve my stats at least, and perhaps I will be able to get more advice on how to better present my application when applying in the future (my undergrad's premed adviser was not helpful at all and pretty much told me not to apply to med school since a 3.6/3.7 gpa is too low).
 
What are the post-interview rates for the schools you are wait listed at? If they are in the 20-30% range, then I wouldn't put much thought into the wait lists. However, if they are 50+% then it would seem there is likely a systematic error on your part at some point in the process. Some schools provide feedback after the season is over if you ask nicely. Also, looking at your list, there are a lot of schools that you have very small chances at such as UCLA, Hopkins, etc that you are better off sparing a donation next cycle.
 
I do suspect that there was something off about my secondary responses but when I look through my answers, there isn't anything that jumps out to me like "Oh, I should have written that better, etc." Granted, I didn't get a second opinion on my secondary essays and I'm not the most eloquent writer, but I felt that I did a pretty decent job of answering the question and providing example(s) and discussing key things that I learned that I felt would show that I am well suited for a career in medicine. If you would like to take a look, I can PM a snippet of one of my responses to one of the more common questions asked just to see if there is something in my responses that I am not catching.

My first interview at my state school was actually on the first day of that school's interview season and my other interviews were in December/January. I felt that my interviews went well; I had gone over my responses with my parents following my last interview and they thought I had given well-thought-out answers to the questions.

At the moment I am still considering applying to some 1-year post-bacc masters programs to improve my stats at least, and perhaps I will be able to get more advice on how to better present my application when applying in the future (my undergrad's premed adviser was not helpful at all and pretty much told me not to apply to med school since a 3.6/3.7 gpa is too low).
I count over 50 secondaries on your list. It is a rare person who could have done a good job on all of them. I know for sure that at least one of them is a month's work!
Parents can not be relied upon for a objective evaluation of their beloved child.
 
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What are the post-interview rates for the schools you are wait listed at? If they are in the 20-30% range, then I wouldn't put much thought into the wait lists. However, if they are 50+% then it would seem there is likely a systematic error on your part at some point in the process. Some schools provide feedback after the season is over if you ask nicely. Also, looking at your list, there are a lot of schools that you have very small chances at such as UCLA, Hopkins, etc that you are better off sparing a donation next cycle.
The 3 schools that I'm waitlisted for are OOS and I know that one of them has a ~18% OOS post-interview acceptance rate; not sure about the other two but apparently 2/3 of the class for one of those schools comes from the waitlist so I'm hoping that'll work out for me come April/May. My state school has a 70% post-interview acceptance rate but I have not heard from them since September so I'm taking that as a rejection. It's hard to gauge that school's interview experience though since one of the interviewers confessed to looking at the wrong applicant's info while interviewing me (then proceeded to continue taking notes on that same page) and the other interviewer asked me to draw a picture of her right on the spot (more like shoved a piece of paper and pencil at me and told me to start drawing) which greatly distracted me from giving better responses.

I count over 50 secondaries on your list. It is a rare person who could have done a good job on all of them. I know for sure that at least one of them is a month's work!
Parents can not be relied upon for a objective evaluation of their beloved child.
There was a lot of overlap in secondary questions so I would take the "template answer" and tailor it to that school's specific question so I was able to recycle many responses to a certain degree (none of the answers were directly copy-pasted from one to another though). I literally spent the entire month of July slaving away at writing the essays--I did volunteer work twice a week but other than that, it was pretty much wake up, write essays, go to bed. And when I finished each school's secondary, I slept on it and did more revising the following day before submitting just to make sure the responses weren't sloppily written. But who knows, maybe halfway through that month, my brain was mush and my essays were crap. Though even as I'm re-reading my responses now, I still feel that they're pretty decent...

And I understand that doting parents may not be the best at giving honest feedback but I can assure you that my parents are not like that at all--they make it a point to remind me that I'm nothing special and if I want to achieve something, I need to do it myself; they'll provide the resources but that's about it. My dad regularly interviews potential employees so he's been good about giving constructive criticism, and my parents did point out a few flaws that they felt I had made during the interviews. I definitely know I could have done better with some of the interview responses (hindsight is always 20/20) so I guess for me, I just give responses that are mediocre/good but not good enough.
 
I'll offer a critique but I am only an applicant so don't necessarily listen to me. The others should shoot me down if I am wrong.

Your non-clinical volunteering seems pretty sparse. Your main activity was a single mission trip and from what I have been told these "voluntourism" activities are not especially attractive to adcoms. Outside of this single activity, you have a smattering of small things that don't seem to have much long term commitment. Since you completely lack any research (also a significant drawback), I think you would want to really stand out in the volunteering category. You do have one strong clinical volunteering activity so maybe this doesn't matter that much.

"GPA compromised due to multiple time-intensive/heavy commitment extracurricular activities (no regrets though! ♡)"
Also this is definitely not an attitude you would want to ever portray to anyone on an application or interview. Your GPA isn't even that bad so I would avoid making excuses as it can only hurt their perception of you.
 
I'll offer a critique but I am only an applicant so don't necessarily listen to me. The others should shoot me down if I am wrong.

Your non-clinical volunteering seems pretty sparse. Your main activity was a single mission trip and from what I have been told these "voluntourism" activities are not especially attractive to adcoms. Outside of this single activity, you have a smattering of small things that don't seem to have much long term commitment. Since you completely lack any research (also a significant drawback), I think you would want to really stand out in the volunteering category. You do have one strong clinical volunteering activity so maybe this doesn't matter that much.

"GPA compromised due to multiple time-intensive/heavy commitment extracurricular activities (no regrets though! ♡)"
Also this is definitely not an attitude you would want to ever portray to anyone on an application or interview. Your GPA isn't even that bad so I would avoid making excuses as it can only hurt their perception of you.
I still appreciate the critique even if you're "only an applicant"; it seems like you've had a successful cycle so far!
To address the points you brought up:

1) Surprisingly my main activity was NOT my missions trip; the preparation was only for a semester and the trip was 2 weeks of my winter break. It's a shame if the adcoms don't think much of it--I don't know of many people who are willing to risk their life to reach out to prostitutes and sex trafficking victims while running the risk of being caught by the Russian mafia. I guess it's hard to tell because the hours seem so little compared to the mission trip, but I was a campus tour guide for a year and did blogging for the school for 2 years, was a Sunday school teacher for a year, and did a number of other non-clinical volunteering for at least a semester (small group leader, teaching assistant, etc.).

2) I lack research because of my molecular toxicology major--research was already incorporated into my curriculum. I wanted to diversify my extracurriculars instead of doing more research on top of what I had to do for class. Also, I am more interested in research with patients/clinical research and not lab-heavy research.

3) Re: my GPA & extracurriculars: My premed adviser told me that my 3.6 GPA was very low and that I shouldn't even consider med school since I wouldn't be competitive so that's what I'm basing it off of. And I wouldn't say that I am using my ECs as an excuse--I actually decided to drop most ECs during my senior year and had a 3.9 GPA during that year so my GPA definitely took a toll because of my EC involvement (I mean, when you have 10+ hours of practice every week with the acapella group and various commitments every night of the week, it's not surprising). There is a very distinct trend in my GPA correlated with my involvement in ECs and I actually had to bring this up during one of my interviews since they were wondering how I managed to jump from a 3.6 during soph/junior year to a 3.9 during senior year; I just bring up that the 3.9 is more reflective of my work/study ethic since I didn't have as many commitments that were competing for my time.

Thanks for the feedback; hopefully this cleared some things up about my application.
 
My premed adviser told me that my 3.6 GPA was very low and that I shouldn't even consider med school since I wouldn't be competitive so that's what I'm basing it off of. And I wouldn't say that I am using my ECs as an excuse--I actually decided to drop most ECs during my senior year and had a 3.9 GPA during that year so my GPA definitely took a toll because of my EC involvement (I mean, when you have 10+ hours of practice every week with the acapella group and various commitments every night of the week, it's not surprising). There is a very distinct trend in my GPA correlated with my involvement in ECs and I actually had to bring this up during one of my interviews since they were wondering how I managed to jump from a 3.6 during soph/junior year to a 3.9 during senior year; I just bring up that the 3.9 is more reflective of my work/study ethic since I didn't have as many commitments that were competing for my time.

Thanks for the feedback; hopefully this cleared some things up about my application.
I hope you realize that your gpa is fine and with the trend it is even better.
 
Would ORM put her at a disadvantage with this application?

Here are some links you can peruse and analyze this for yourself.
https://www.aamc.org/download/321540/data/factstableb5.pdf

https://www.aamc.org/download/321476/data/factstablea10.pdf
https://www.aamc.org/download/321478/data/factstablea11.pdf
You can calculate the acceptance rate for each race in each state using this data.

1) The advantage or disadvantage any applicant of any race faces is largely unpredictable. The "advantage/disadvantage" that might come is dependent on that specific applicant pool that year of a specific school, the accepted class etc
2) The Asian "disadvantage" those AAMC charts show is largely overstated. The reason ORM acceptance rates tend to be lower than whites has more to due with mostly demographics of applicants; there are far more whites in "lucky" states in comparison to Asians and a far greater proportion of Asian applicants come from the "unlucky states" than whites.

Go through the data and you will see the Asian acceptance rate in all of the south, west and central regions are about identical to whites. Only in the northeast is their a gap(and last year there was no gap this is all incredibly variable. As an example PA last year had a 50% asian acceptance rate and whites 46%. This year Whites 47% Asians 34%.). There are some minor disadvantages Asians might face in the process, but if you were to evaluate potential disadvantages the OP faced, that wouldnt be pretty far down the list on most likely and impact.
 
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I'm referring to more non religious ones. I don't think OP's was explicitly religious? Just a general mission targeted at sex trafficking mission.
Do you speak the language of the locals?
Does the trip is use skills that you are passing along to locals?
Does your free labor displace a local who could be earning a living doing this work?
Is this work in collaboration with a local organization that will sustain the work?
 
Yes, sorta (my group helped an organization that was providing sex trafficking victims + refugees with the tools/means to gain employment, we helped that organization/refugees with their day to day tasks, we also served/cooked food for them and other supportive things like that), no, and yes.
Then, do this because you believe it to be right (and be able to support it if asked about it).
 
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