Hello. My name is Victoria. I am 35 years old. I am looking for a medical education for foreigners and need your advice. 10 years ago I graduated a linguistic university (my speciality was English language and literature), but I always dreamed to become a doctor. After graduating the university I was working and studying physics, maths, biology and chemistry by myself, because there was always a hope for me to become a doctor. Finding out that Medical School students study only 4 years, I decided to try my best passing the MCAT, but recently I've learned from the Internet that before entering Medical School entries need to attend PreMed school courses. I was so distressed finding this out, because I am 35 and when I graduate PreMed School, Medical School and Residency I will be almost 50 years old. 2 months ago I successfully passed the MCAT online on the Internet. Could you please advise me a Medical School which do not require a PreMed School attendance? And is it possible to pass the MCAT without PreMed School in general and particularly in my case? Thank you in advance.
Is it possible to pass the MCAT without PreMed School?
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:troll:
Sorry, if you think that I am a troll, maybe my question is so weird for you, I don't know where to ask, If I knew, I wouldn't have asked this question here. I really want to know how to pass this test and is it possible to pass it without studying in PreMed School?
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Hey Sandy,
No US Medical Schools will accept you without the pre-med coursework requirements.
There ARE schools in the Carribean who would probably take you--but no decent school will.
If you wish to become a Doctor, you'd need to take the coursework and apply.
No US Medical Schools will accept you without the pre-med coursework requirements.
There ARE schools in the Carribean who would probably take you--but no decent school will.
If you wish to become a Doctor, you'd need to take the coursework and apply.
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I'll take this one!
1) In the U.S., all medical schools require, at the very minimum, the following coursework:
2 semesters of biology with lab
2 semesters of general or inorganic chemistry with lab
2 semesters of physics with lab
2 semesters of organic chemistry with lab
If you are really motivated (and can jump through the immigration hoops), you can finish all of these courses in 1.5-2 years.
2) The MCAT is not a "Pass/Fail" test. It is scored on a scale from 3 to 45. It currently covers all of the above material plus a little bit of anatomy, physiology, and language skills. Beginning in 2015 it will also include behavioral science material.
3) You are allowed to take the MCAT whenever you want but without the prerequisite courses you won't get into a US medical school.
Best of luck
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Some of this has already been said, but for starters you don't attend "premed school". There are prerequisites that need to be completed first at any college. And you don't pass the MCAT, especially on the internet.
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Just a FYI for anyone who finds them self here:
Getting Into Med School Without Hard Sciences
For generations of pre-med students, three things have been as certain as death and taxes: organic chemistry, physics and the Medical College Admission Test, known by its dread-inducing acronym, the MCAT.
So it came as a total shock to Elizabeth Adler when she discovered, through a singer in her favorite a cappella group at Brown University, that one of the nation’s top medical schools admits a small number of students every year who have skipped all three requirements.
Until then, despite being the daughter of a physician, she said, “I was kind of thinking medical school was not the right track for me.”
Ms. Adler became one of the lucky few in one of the best kept secrets in the cutthroat world of medical school admissions, the Humanities and Medicine Program at the Mount Sinai medical school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
The program promises slots to about 35 undergraduates a year if they study humanities or social sciences instead of the traditional pre-medical school curriculum and maintain a 3.5 grade-point average.
For decades, the medical profession has debated whether pre-med courses and admission tests produce doctors who know their alkyl halides but lack the sense of mission and interpersonal skills to become well-rounded, caring, inquisitive healers.
That debate is being rekindled by a study published on Thursday inAcademic Medicine, the journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges. Conducted by the Mount Sinai program’s founder, Dr. Nathan Kase, and the medical school’s dean for medical education, Dr. David Muller, the peer-reviewed study compared outcomes for 85 students in the Humanities and Medicine Program with those of 606 traditionally prepared classmates from the graduating classes of 2004 through 2009, and found that their academic performance in medical school was equivalent.
“There’s no question,” Dr. Kase said. “The default pathway is: Well, how did they do on the MCAT? How did they do on organic chemistry? What was their grade-point average?”
“That excludes a lot of kids,” said Dr. Kase, who founded the Mount Sinai program in 1987 when he was dean of the medical school, and who is now dean emeritus and a professor of obstetrics and gynecology. “But it also diminishes; it makes science into an obstacle rather than something that is an insight into the biology of human disease.”
Whether the study’s findings will inspire other medical schools to change admissions requirements remains to be seen.
Because MCAT scores are used by U.S. News and World Report and others to rank schools, the most competitive ones fear dropping the test, admissions officials said. And at least two recent studies found that MCAT scores were better than grade-point averages at predicting performance in medical school and on the series of licensing exams that medical students and doctors must take.
“You have to have the proper amount of moral courage to say ‘O.K., we’re going to skip over a lot of the huge barriers to a lot of our students,’ ” said Dr. David Battinelli, senior associate dean for education at Hofstra University School of Medicine.
But, Dr. Battinelli added, “Now let’s see how they’re doing 5 and 10 years down the road.” The Mount Sinai study did not answer the question.
There are a few other schools in the United States and Canada that admit students without MCAT scores, but Mount Sinai appears to have gone furthest in eschewing traditional science preparation, said Dr. Dan Hunt, co-secretary of the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, the medical school accrediting agency.
The students apply in their sophomore or junior years in college and agree to major in humanities or social science, rather than the hard sciences. If they are admitted, they are required to take only basic biology and chemistry, at a level many students accomplish through Advanced Placement courses in high school.
They forgo organic chemistry, physics and calculus — though they get abbreviated organic chemistry and physics courses during a summer boot camp run by Mount Sinai. They are exempt from the MCAT. Instead, they are admitted into the program based on their high school SAT scores, two personal essays, their high school and early college grades and interviews.
The study found that, by some measures, the humanities students made more sensitive doctors: they were more than twice as likely to train aspsychiatrists (14 percent compared with 5.6 percent of their classmates) and somewhat more likely — though less so than Dr. Kase had expected — to go into primary care fields, like pediatrics and obstetrics and gynecology (49 percent compared with 39 percent). Conversely, they avoid some fields, like surgical subspecialties and anesthesiology.
But what surprised the authors the most, they said, was that humanities students were significantly more likely than their peers to devote a year to scholarly research (28 percent compared with 14 percent). They scored lower on Step 1 of the Medical Licensing Examination, taken after the second year of medical school, which generally correlates with scientific knowledge. But over all, they ranked about the same in honors grades and in the percentage in the top quarter of the class.
Humanities students were also more likely to take a leave of absence for personal reasons, which could reflect some ambivalence about their choices, the study authors said.
Typically, 5 percent to 10 percent of the class drops out before getting to medical school. Those students cannot handle the science or they have changed their minds about their intention to be a doctor, said Miki Rifkin, the program director. One who dropped out was Jonathan Safran Foer, who became an acclaimed novelist.
Dr. Kase founded the Mount Sinai program shortly after a national report on physician preparation questioned the single-minded focus on hard science.
He began with a few students from five colleges and universities that did not have their own medical schools — Amherst, Brandeis, Princeton, Wesleyan and Williams — because, he said, “we did not want to poach.”
It has been going full tilt for the past 10 years, and received nearly 300 applications last year from more than 80 colleges across the country, though admissions heavily favor elite schools.
Among undergraduates accepted in 2009, the mean SAT math and verbal score was 1444, and the mean freshman G.P.A. was 3.74. About a third of the class had at least one parent who was a physician; among all medical schools, about one in five has a parent who is a doctor.
Among the current crop is Ms. Adler, 21, a senior at Brown studying global political economy and majoring in development studies.
Ms. Adler said she was inspired by her freshman study abroad in Africa. “I didn’t want to waste a class on physics, or waste a class on orgo,” she said. “The social determinants of health are so much more pervasive than the immediate biology of it.”
She added that her parents, however, were “thrilled when I decided to go the M.D. route, because they were worried about my job security.”
A classmate in the program, Kathryn Friedman, 21, graduated from the Chapin School in New York City, before going to Williams, where she is a senior, majoring in political science. Her mother and uncle are doctors at Mount Sinai; her father, Robert Friedman, who works in the entertainment business, is on the Mount Sinai Medical Center board.
The humanities program has allowed her to pursue other interests, like playing varsity tennis and going abroad, she said. When her pre-med classmates hear about the program, she said, “a lot of them are jealous.”
She added, “They are, like, ‘Wow, I wish I had known about that.’ ”
Getting Into Med School Without Hard Sciences
For generations of pre-med students, three things have been as certain as death and taxes: organic chemistry, physics and the Medical College Admission Test, known by its dread-inducing acronym, the MCAT.
So it came as a total shock to Elizabeth Adler when she discovered, through a singer in her favorite a cappella group at Brown University, that one of the nation’s top medical schools admits a small number of students every year who have skipped all three requirements.
Until then, despite being the daughter of a physician, she said, “I was kind of thinking medical school was not the right track for me.”
Ms. Adler became one of the lucky few in one of the best kept secrets in the cutthroat world of medical school admissions, the Humanities and Medicine Program at the Mount Sinai medical school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
The program promises slots to about 35 undergraduates a year if they study humanities or social sciences instead of the traditional pre-medical school curriculum and maintain a 3.5 grade-point average.
For decades, the medical profession has debated whether pre-med courses and admission tests produce doctors who know their alkyl halides but lack the sense of mission and interpersonal skills to become well-rounded, caring, inquisitive healers.
That debate is being rekindled by a study published on Thursday inAcademic Medicine, the journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges. Conducted by the Mount Sinai program’s founder, Dr. Nathan Kase, and the medical school’s dean for medical education, Dr. David Muller, the peer-reviewed study compared outcomes for 85 students in the Humanities and Medicine Program with those of 606 traditionally prepared classmates from the graduating classes of 2004 through 2009, and found that their academic performance in medical school was equivalent.
“There’s no question,” Dr. Kase said. “The default pathway is: Well, how did they do on the MCAT? How did they do on organic chemistry? What was their grade-point average?”
“That excludes a lot of kids,” said Dr. Kase, who founded the Mount Sinai program in 1987 when he was dean of the medical school, and who is now dean emeritus and a professor of obstetrics and gynecology. “But it also diminishes; it makes science into an obstacle rather than something that is an insight into the biology of human disease.”
Whether the study’s findings will inspire other medical schools to change admissions requirements remains to be seen.
Because MCAT scores are used by U.S. News and World Report and others to rank schools, the most competitive ones fear dropping the test, admissions officials said. And at least two recent studies found that MCAT scores were better than grade-point averages at predicting performance in medical school and on the series of licensing exams that medical students and doctors must take.
“You have to have the proper amount of moral courage to say ‘O.K., we’re going to skip over a lot of the huge barriers to a lot of our students,’ ” said Dr. David Battinelli, senior associate dean for education at Hofstra University School of Medicine.
But, Dr. Battinelli added, “Now let’s see how they’re doing 5 and 10 years down the road.” The Mount Sinai study did not answer the question.
There are a few other schools in the United States and Canada that admit students without MCAT scores, but Mount Sinai appears to have gone furthest in eschewing traditional science preparation, said Dr. Dan Hunt, co-secretary of the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, the medical school accrediting agency.
The students apply in their sophomore or junior years in college and agree to major in humanities or social science, rather than the hard sciences. If they are admitted, they are required to take only basic biology and chemistry, at a level many students accomplish through Advanced Placement courses in high school.
They forgo organic chemistry, physics and calculus — though they get abbreviated organic chemistry and physics courses during a summer boot camp run by Mount Sinai. They are exempt from the MCAT. Instead, they are admitted into the program based on their high school SAT scores, two personal essays, their high school and early college grades and interviews.
The study found that, by some measures, the humanities students made more sensitive doctors: they were more than twice as likely to train aspsychiatrists (14 percent compared with 5.6 percent of their classmates) and somewhat more likely — though less so than Dr. Kase had expected — to go into primary care fields, like pediatrics and obstetrics and gynecology (49 percent compared with 39 percent). Conversely, they avoid some fields, like surgical subspecialties and anesthesiology.
But what surprised the authors the most, they said, was that humanities students were significantly more likely than their peers to devote a year to scholarly research (28 percent compared with 14 percent). They scored lower on Step 1 of the Medical Licensing Examination, taken after the second year of medical school, which generally correlates with scientific knowledge. But over all, they ranked about the same in honors grades and in the percentage in the top quarter of the class.
Humanities students were also more likely to take a leave of absence for personal reasons, which could reflect some ambivalence about their choices, the study authors said.
Typically, 5 percent to 10 percent of the class drops out before getting to medical school. Those students cannot handle the science or they have changed their minds about their intention to be a doctor, said Miki Rifkin, the program director. One who dropped out was Jonathan Safran Foer, who became an acclaimed novelist.
Dr. Kase founded the Mount Sinai program shortly after a national report on physician preparation questioned the single-minded focus on hard science.
He began with a few students from five colleges and universities that did not have their own medical schools — Amherst, Brandeis, Princeton, Wesleyan and Williams — because, he said, “we did not want to poach.”
It has been going full tilt for the past 10 years, and received nearly 300 applications last year from more than 80 colleges across the country, though admissions heavily favor elite schools.
Among undergraduates accepted in 2009, the mean SAT math and verbal score was 1444, and the mean freshman G.P.A. was 3.74. About a third of the class had at least one parent who was a physician; among all medical schools, about one in five has a parent who is a doctor.
Among the current crop is Ms. Adler, 21, a senior at Brown studying global political economy and majoring in development studies.
Ms. Adler said she was inspired by her freshman study abroad in Africa. “I didn’t want to waste a class on physics, or waste a class on orgo,” she said. “The social determinants of health are so much more pervasive than the immediate biology of it.”
She added that her parents, however, were “thrilled when I decided to go the M.D. route, because they were worried about my job security.”
A classmate in the program, Kathryn Friedman, 21, graduated from the Chapin School in New York City, before going to Williams, where she is a senior, majoring in political science. Her mother and uncle are doctors at Mount Sinai; her father, Robert Friedman, who works in the entertainment business, is on the Mount Sinai Medical Center board.
The humanities program has allowed her to pursue other interests, like playing varsity tennis and going abroad, she said. When her pre-med classmates hear about the program, she said, “a lot of them are jealous.”
She added, “They are, like, ‘Wow, I wish I had known about that.’ ”
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