loopdloopofhenle
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Hi all. I'm hoping for some help assessing how ready I am for applying (ideally MD, but open to DO if necessary). Are there any red flags/big gaps/things missing? Is there anything I should do to improve my application? I'm not looking for help with a school list at this time (no MCAT yet), mostly an overall assessment of competitiveness or things to work on. Thank you so much for reading!
cGPA and sGPA as calculated by AMCAS: cGPA: 3.68/sGPA: 3.57
MCAT: pending
State of residence: OR; strong ties to NJ
Ethnicity and/or race: White female
Undergraduate institution or category: Private liberal arts college
Clinical Experience (7800+ hours paid):
4+ years full time as a patient care coordinator, then manager at a community health clinic working with majority homeless patient population with complex mental health and substance use disorders. Face to face contact with patients on site for medical appointments. Mix of administrative and clinical work. Phones, medication refills, prior authorizations, rooming patients, collecting vitals, chaperoning clinical exams, etc.
Research Experience (10,500+ hour paid/? hours unpaid):
Paid research experience:
10,500+ (5.5 years) full time as R&D scientist in industry. No publications, just a lot of proprietary internal reports. I’m not sure if this counts as research since it’s not research in the traditional academic sense?
Unpaid research experience:
Poster presentation at a national medical conference with providers from my clinical job (not presenting author but attended conference, contributed to poster)
Multiple years of undergraduate research culminating in an honors thesis with oral defense (I have no idea how many hours, this was over 10-12 years ago)
Shadowing experience and specialties represented:
70 hours emergency medicine
Hundreds of hours primary care and addiction medicine at paid clinical job
Not sure if I need more hours with more specialties, or if my work experience counts as shadowing? I sit in the room with providers all day and often chaperone patient exams, and assist providers during appointments.
Non-clinical volunteering (265 hours):
Domestic violence shelter: 24/7 phone line, children’s program, crisis response team
LORs:
2 physician leaders I’ve worked closely with for past 4 years
2 supervisors from paid employment
1 science professor from undergrad (also worked with him post grad a bit)
Other extracurricular activities (including athletics, military service, gap year activities, leadership, teaching, etc):
Have been working full time since graduating undergrad many years ago
Worked full time every summer and winter break throughout college (not sure if I should list this employment under work and activities in my application?)
Leadership/Teaching:
Post graduation:
3.5 years as manager at community health center (supervised medical assistants and patient care coordinators on primary care teams and substance use disorder teams, see clinical experience above)
Was department representative at industry job, training department of 20 people on controlled documents and company safety procedures, as well as inspecting and preparing 8 department laboratories for regulatory audits (I don’t know if this counts as leadership in terms of application?)
Teaching assistant/Resident assistant for undergraduate summer science research program multiple years at alma mater
During undergrad:
Teaching assistant: general chemistry, organic chemistry
Tutor: general chemistry, biology
Club officer for chemistry club
Club officer for student environmental group
Board member for chemistry honors society (helped started university’s chapter)
Relevant honors or awards:
All from undergrad:
Award honoring outstanding senior majoring in chemistry for national chemistry organization
Environmental science and engineering scholarship
Biology and Chemistry national honor societies
Dean’s list/honor’s scholar
Anything else not listed you think might be important:
First generation college grad
Non-traditional applicant, graduated in 2015 (was not premed, but coincidentally completed all prerequisites due to either major or interest)
LGBT (only place it may possibly come up in my application is secondaries, depending on prompts)
Some questions:
cGPA and sGPA as calculated by AMCAS: cGPA: 3.68/sGPA: 3.57
MCAT: pending
State of residence: OR; strong ties to NJ
Ethnicity and/or race: White female
Undergraduate institution or category: Private liberal arts college
Clinical Experience (7800+ hours paid):
4+ years full time as a patient care coordinator, then manager at a community health clinic working with majority homeless patient population with complex mental health and substance use disorders. Face to face contact with patients on site for medical appointments. Mix of administrative and clinical work. Phones, medication refills, prior authorizations, rooming patients, collecting vitals, chaperoning clinical exams, etc.
Research Experience (10,500+ hour paid/? hours unpaid):
Paid research experience:
10,500+ (5.5 years) full time as R&D scientist in industry. No publications, just a lot of proprietary internal reports. I’m not sure if this counts as research since it’s not research in the traditional academic sense?
Unpaid research experience:
Poster presentation at a national medical conference with providers from my clinical job (not presenting author but attended conference, contributed to poster)
Multiple years of undergraduate research culminating in an honors thesis with oral defense (I have no idea how many hours, this was over 10-12 years ago)
Shadowing experience and specialties represented:
70 hours emergency medicine
Hundreds of hours primary care and addiction medicine at paid clinical job
Not sure if I need more hours with more specialties, or if my work experience counts as shadowing? I sit in the room with providers all day and often chaperone patient exams, and assist providers during appointments.
Non-clinical volunteering (265 hours):
Domestic violence shelter: 24/7 phone line, children’s program, crisis response team
LORs:
2 physician leaders I’ve worked closely with for past 4 years
2 supervisors from paid employment
1 science professor from undergrad (also worked with him post grad a bit)
Other extracurricular activities (including athletics, military service, gap year activities, leadership, teaching, etc):
Have been working full time since graduating undergrad many years ago
Worked full time every summer and winter break throughout college (not sure if I should list this employment under work and activities in my application?)
Leadership/Teaching:
Post graduation:
3.5 years as manager at community health center (supervised medical assistants and patient care coordinators on primary care teams and substance use disorder teams, see clinical experience above)
Was department representative at industry job, training department of 20 people on controlled documents and company safety procedures, as well as inspecting and preparing 8 department laboratories for regulatory audits (I don’t know if this counts as leadership in terms of application?)
Teaching assistant/Resident assistant for undergraduate summer science research program multiple years at alma mater
During undergrad:
Teaching assistant: general chemistry, organic chemistry
Tutor: general chemistry, biology
Club officer for chemistry club
Club officer for student environmental group
Board member for chemistry honors society (helped started university’s chapter)
Relevant honors or awards:
All from undergrad:
Award honoring outstanding senior majoring in chemistry for national chemistry organization
Environmental science and engineering scholarship
Biology and Chemistry national honor societies
Dean’s list/honor’s scholar
Anything else not listed you think might be important:
First generation college grad
Non-traditional applicant, graduated in 2015 (was not premed, but coincidentally completed all prerequisites due to either major or interest)
LGBT (only place it may possibly come up in my application is secondaries, depending on prompts)
Some questions:
- Is it okay to list activities from undergrad if I’m a non-traditional student so far out from undergrad? I was commuting and taking care of a sick family member for a large portion of this time so I don’t have as many extracurricular activities after graduation as I would like.
- If okay to list activities from undergrad, what do I do if I don’t know how many hours an activity was? Most of them were 10-12 years ago, but some of them required a significant time commitment (like research/thesis). Can I estimate hours in good faith? Or should I leave out these activities?
- If I held multiple roles at the same company (paid employment), should I list them under one work/activity entry or separate them into multiple entries?
