I am finishing my PostBac this year and will be applying to Medschool next semester. I am not too familiar with protocol for letters of recommendation. Should I ask some influential people to write me letters of Rec now and just hoarde them? I am not sure I will have as easy of a time seeking out these people during the application process. Do letters have to be sent directly from recommenders to schools??
Different schools will handle letters differently, by-in-large, however, medical schools will ask for an undergraduate committee letter/packet. If you cannot obtain a committee letter/packet, you'll need to contact the individual schools to determine how they want letters sent. Most of the ones that I came across allowed you to send letters directly to their school, provided that you wrote an explanation as to why you weren't able to obtain a committee letter. If you aren't able to get a committee to send out your letters and to write you an evaluation, then I'd advise using an online service such as VirtualEvals, which provides much ease in sending out letters.
Yes, you should begin collecting letters as soon as possible, but they do not have to be from so-called "influential" people. What's more important is that your letters come from professors who can write really supportive letters on your behalf. Really get to the people who are going to write you letters; it helps tremendously. Don't be shy about asking professors for letters. They except this; it is a normal part of their profession. Simply be polite and professional, and ask them if they will be able to write you a letter in strong support of your candidacy for medical school. It's important to determine if they can write a strong letter; if not, then it's better not to have them write one.
Also, I don't plan on shadowing a physician in the near future but I have quite a bit of experience with first hand patient care. I worked for the latter years of college as a rehabilitation associate at a Traumatic Brain Injury facility. I worked roughly 40 hours/week for over a year, dealing with patients and doctors on a daily basis. Do adcoms see that as the same as "shadowing" or should I actually go and shadow a doc?
Well, there is no shadowing requirement for allopathic schools. They simply want you to understand the role of a physician and to be able to answer why you want to be a doctor. Oftentimes, people use shadowing as a way to help answer those kinds of questions. It sounds like you have good clinical experience. Awesome. Schools will love that. However, shadowing is something quite different than working in a clinical setting. Shadowing is where you actually follow a physician around as he or she goes about their daily duties; you "do" everything they do, from backend chart scrubbing to the patient assessment, etc. You are kind of trying the physician's job on for size, so to speak. Again, it isn't necessary, but it can be an enlightening experience. I had the fortune of following some great doctors, who allowed me to get real hands-on.
