is a SMP worth it???

[conflicted78]

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I applied this previous cycle and so far have been waitlisted at one school and haven't heard any good news from the others I have applied to. My current stats are

cGPA: 2.8
sGPA: 3.2
MCAT: 31Q

Obviously my gpa's are extremely low, but I am a non-traditional applicant at I graduated with a 2.52 gpa and only took 2 science courses plus two calculus courses as an undergrad. After graduating with a degree in political science I did an informal post-bacc to complete all the pre-reqs for med school and earned a 3.78 gpa in 40 credit hours. My dilemma is that I have been accepted to a SMP program as well as a DO school and I am aspiring to become a cardiothoracic surgeon and do my residency at a prestigious university. I've contacted several of the universities that I'm interested in, and none have even offered a DO an interview.

Would excelling in the SMP make me a much more competitive applicant for MD schools, or should I just count myself lucky to have an acceptance at all and just start?

Please don't make this an MD vs DO thing, I'm simply looking for an answer on whether excelling in the SMP would enable me to overcome my abysmal gap's

 

[IrishCogs]

I'm currently in a 1 year SMP, class of 2013, so I am biased. My stats are sGPA/cGPA = 3.1 and MCAT = 34O. I was accepted this year and I know I wouldn't have been without performing extremely well in my program. It's very likely you would get an MD acceptance if you did very well in a SMP - but that's just the thing, you have to do very well. This is not an easy task. I repeat. It is a horrible year. Not only to mention that if you do poorly in SMP you will likely rescind any chance of acceptance even at a DO school. Knowing what I know now, if I would have been accepted to a DO school prior to SMP I would have been very happy (I had never applied before) but that is just my opinion.

I think it comes down to your feelings on MD vs DO and how much you're willing to sacrifice to go for the MD. ALSO, don't forget about how expensive these programs are, are you willing to take on $50K more debt?

 

[getdown]

I applied this previous cycle and so far have been waitlisted at one school and haven't heard any good news from the others I have applied to. My current stats are

cGPA: 2.8
sGPA: 3.2
MCAT: 31Q

Obviously my gpa's are extremely low, but I am a non-traditional applicant at I graduated with a 2.52 gpa and only took 2 science courses plus two calculus courses as an undergrad. After graduating with a degree in political science I did an informal post-bacc to complete all the pre-reqs for med school and earned a 3.78 gpa in 40 credit hours. My dilemma is that I have been accepted to a SMP program as well as a DO school and I am aspiring to become a cardiothoracic surgeon and do my residency at a prestigious university. I've contacted several of the universities that I'm interested in, and none have even offered a DO an interview.

Would excelling in the SMP make me a much more competitive applicant for MD schools, or should I just count myself lucky to have an acceptance at all and just start?

Please don't make this an MD vs DO thing, I'm simply looking for an answer on whether excelling in the SMP would enable me to overcome my abysmal gap's

The short answer is that doing an SMP will only help you in terms of showing you're a good candidate that can excel in medical school.

My personal thoughts are that you should really take the DO offer over trying to get into an MD school again cause you just never know if you'll ever get accepted. The other thing is that you never want to pigeon-hole yourself to being such a superspecialized field before even entering medical school. More than 80% of kids coming into med school end up matching in a field they never considered. For you to say you only want to do CT surgery at this point is a bit premature. Keep an open mind... not to mention CT surgery as a field is ebbing away due to less invasive methods of intervention.

Furthermore, you can still match into an MD surgical program coming out of a DO school. Now, matching into a top university program in a metro area? That's going to be a bigger problem. Check the link below as it discusses this matter pretty well and provides good information.

http://forums.studentdoctor.net/showthread.php?t=933492

Anyway man, med school is getting harder and harder to get into these days and you should never give up an acceptance for something you feel is better. An acceptance is an acceptance and many students would kill for that right now. You might as well get in an have to worry about that later rather than ending up with nothing at all. My two cents.

 

[mcloaf]

You have a 2.8 cGPA and you want to turn down a DO acceptance? You can't be serious...

 

[Sophocles]

It seems that there is only one CTS residency available for osteopathic physicians, but isn't the integration going to change this?

Either way, I wouldn't make such an important decision based upon which residency program you are interested in. I think the bigger question, as stated above, do you want to go DO or MD. Who knows what residencies will be looking for 4-5 years from now, or what you will be looking for, for that matter.

I would boil it down to MD v DO. If you have to do MD then go to the SMP, if not then go to DO.

Nobody can tell you what you should or shouldn't do, this is entirely based upon your preference.

I also think you should move away from thinking in terms of prestige. Eventually, you'll stop caring about what other people think of you and become more concerned about whether or not you're happy with yourself. Just my opinion though.

 

[487806]

I applied this previous cycle and so far have been waitlisted at one school and haven't heard any good news from the others I have applied to. My current stats are

cGPA: 2.8
sGPA: 3.2
MCAT: 31Q

Obviously my gpa's are extremely low, but I am a non-traditional applicant at I graduated with a 2.52 gpa and only took 2 science courses plus two calculus courses as an undergrad. After graduating with a degree in political science I did an informal post-bacc to complete all the pre-reqs for med school and earned a 3.78 gpa in 40 credit hours. My dilemma is that I have been accepted to a SMP program as well as a DO school and I am aspiring to become a cardiothoracic surgeon and do my residency at a prestigious university. I've contacted several of the universities that I'm interested in, and none have even offered a DO an interview.

Would excelling in the SMP make me a much more competitive applicant for MD schools, or should I just count myself lucky to have an acceptance at all and just start?

Please don't make this an MD vs DO thing, I'm simply looking for an answer on whether excelling in the SMP would enable me to overcome my abysmal gap's

While it's good you have your mind set on a specialty (specifically a subspecialty), you'll probably change your mind after you finish medical school. So take the DO acceptance and move on.

 

[conflicted78]

I really appreciate it. As far as degrees go I really don't care whether I get a DO or an MD, I just don't want to pigeon hole myself later on down the road and make it extremely difficult to accomplish my goals. I know that it's odd that Im this specific with what I want to be but I've worked for the last 3 years in surgical settings as well as the ICU and I absolutely love the O.R. especially heart procedures as well as trauma surgeries. I know that these, while maybe not as competitive as the used to be, are still very difficult to place in to and the residencies merging will only make it more difficult for DO's as there will that many more MD's gunning for the spots currently reserved for DO's. That's why I'm concerned about going DO. Plus on the other side the DO school i was accepted to is one of the new ones and they don't seem to be all that prepared/together from my end.

 

[deleted480308]

Take the acceptance

 

[Law2Doc]

I applied this previous cycle and so far have been waitlisted at one school and haven't heard any good news from the others I have applied to. My current stats are

cGPA: 2.8
sGPA: 3.2
MCAT: 31Q

Obviously my gpa's are extremely low, but I am a non-traditional applicant at I graduated with a 2.52 gpa and only took 2 science courses plus two calculus courses as an undergrad. After graduating with a degree in political science I did an informal post-bacc to complete all the pre-reqs for med school and earned a 3.78 gpa in 40 credit hours. My dilemma is that I have been accepted to a SMP program as well as a DO school and I am aspiring to become a cardiothoracic surgeon and do my residency at a prestigious university. I've contacted several of the universities that I'm interested in, and none have even offered a DO an interview.

Would excelling in the SMP make me a much more competitive applicant for MD schools, or should I just count myself lucky to have an acceptance at all and just start?

Please don't make this an MD vs DO thing, I'm simply looking for an answer on whether excelling in the SMP would enable me to overcome my abysmal gap's

Not all fixes work for all people. An SMP isn't useful for someone who really needs to raise their GPA. It's used for people with close to an adequate GPA to show they can handle the rigors of med school. If you were to do additional premed schooling, you'd probably want to take a few more undergrad courses to get that GPA up to a 3.0 before bothering with an SMP. Could be a Long process. As such you should probably just go DO. This kind of question should really be asked on the nontrad board, though.

 

[wingedhelmet]

One issue is that you're not decided between a DO acceptance and an SMP acceptance. You're deciding between a DO acceptance against a plan to go to an SMP. 6 years ago I was, to the best of my knowledge, the very last student my SMP accepted with a sub 3.0 GPA. At this point the average GPA has climbed to nearly a 3.6, and the MCAT average is higher than your MCAT. Most of the really good programs are starting to boast stats that only a decade ago would have been impressive an actual medical school application: Georgetown, Cincinnati, EVMS, and Tulane ACP have all gotten almost a competitive as medical school itself. You're right that you take a chance either way, but if you take a chance on an SMP you need to overcome three improbabilities: you need to get in, you need to do better than a ton of equally desperate people, and then you need to find an allopathic medical school that's so impressed by your performance that they'll overlook a 2.8.

Also, just so you know, I was dead set on Orthopedic surgery when I started medical school. I had shadowed in a few fields, I had a mechanical engineering degree, it seemed like my thing. When I hit third year it took about a single week of my surgery rotation to realize I would never love or even like the OR. Then I ended up really liking Peds, and now I'm really happy doing it. If I had accumulated an extra two years of debt pursing high priced SMPs, I might have convinced myself to pursue a higher paying profession instead of Pediatrics. While you might be right that you want trauma surgery, you don't really know what you want to do yet, and debt can close doors that you don't yet know you want to keep open.

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[conflicted78]

One issue is that you're not decided between a DO acceptance and an SMP acceptance. You're deciding between a DO acceptance against a plan to go to an SMP. 6 years ago I was, to the best of my knowledge, the very last student my SMP accepted with a sub 3.0 GPA. At this point the average GPA has climbed to nearly a 3.6, and the MCAT average is higher than your MCAT. Most of the really good programs are starting to boast stats that only a decade ago would have been impressive an actual medical school application: Georgetown, Cincinnati, EVMS, and Tulane ACP have all gotten almost a competitive as medical school itself. You're right that you take a chance either way, but if you take a chance on an SMP you need to overcome three improbabilities: you need to get in, you need to do better than a ton of equally desperate people, and then you need to find an allopathic medical school that's so impressed by your performance that they'll overlook a 2.8.

Also, just so you know, I was dead set on Orthopedic surgery when I started medical school. I had shadowed in a few fields, I had a mechanical engineering degree, it seemed like my thing. When I hit third year it took about a single week of my surgery rotation to realize I would never love or even like the OR. Then I ended up really liking Peds, and now I'm really happy doing it. If I had accumulated an extra two years of debt pursing high priced SMPs, I might have convinced myself to pursue a higher paying profession instead of Pediatrics. While you might be right that you want trauma surgery, you don't really know what you want to do yet, and debt can close doors that you don't yet know you want to keep open.

I in fact have already applied to two of the very SMP program you mentioned and have been waitlisted at one and accepted at the other, which is why this decision is so difficult for me. I'm fairly confident I can do well as my low GPA's are due to a lack of motivation and direction in undergrad. Once I realized I wanted to become a physician I took all the pre-req classes simultaneously throughout the course of year and earned a 3.78. But my biggest concern is exactly what you mentioned that despite excelling in the SMP many schools won't overlook that 2.8

 

[nysegop]

Just go to an osteopathic school. AOA is merging with its MD counterpart, so it honestly won't matter for residencies purposes where you go to medical school. It'll save you a bunch of time and money.