Medical Please be brutally honest. Should I give up?

[lord999]

I want to see what are my chances at US MD schools. I am currently looking at Stony Brook, Emory, and 20 other international friendly schools as my school list.

I am an international student (East Asian) without a green card. I did well mostly A, a couple of A- on my premed courses. But I got a few Bs in my graduate-level course and independent studies. I know that admission does not really care about major but I took many physical science/CS courses that were known to be challenging and are at grad level. My cGPA is 3.8.

I originally wanted to MD/PhD but that did not work out because I ended up switching labs a couple of times (abusive environments > depression) and now I am settled in a happier environment. But I don't have a publication(s) or 3+ years commitment of commitments to demonstrate my serious interest in research. I did 3-4 research poster presentations.

mentoring and tutoring experiences
volunteering hours 200+ hrs
clinical volunteering 100+ hrs (nursing home, childhood cancer survivors, pediatric patients)
shadowing 30 hrs (I am working on this right now)
research 40 hrs/week almost every semester + one summer

People are telling me that the chances are kind of low and I should do PhD (computational biology) or dentistry instead. What do you think?

Laconic statement: In all of this, what do you want out of your career?

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[Goro]

Can't advise without an MCAT

 

[Mr.Smile12]

Wait a second. Dentistry is not a fallback if you cannot get into medical school, and it's definitely not a fallback if you originally wanted an MD/PhD. As an international student, you will need to be aware of which schools would not enroll international students, and MD/PhD programs need some outstanding statistics and a strong motivation towards clinical/translational research. To that end, while major isn't a big deal, a good track record in upper-level biomedical science courses would be to your advantage in such an application.

We can't really assess anyone's chances without an MCAT score, but this goes a little deeper into asking yourself (as pointed out earlier) what do you really want to do? I don't think that going into medicine is going to be any less stressful or be devoid of abusive environments that you will like in any better than the labs you had to leave. Graduate school is also not going to be a picnic either (as noted in a lot of recent posts about mental health and depression among graduate and professional students).