Possible year off?

[tragicallyhip'n]

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Hey everyone,

I'm currently a sophomore and am looking ahead to the coming years. I was thinking about not taking the mcats until august before senior year, and then spend a year after college with a service corps. Anyone have any comments on whether or not this is a good idea? Anyone done this? Any recommendations on service organizations, ie mercy corps or jesuit volunteer corps? Thanks for all of your help.

 

[DrBowtie]

IMO, take the MCAT and apply on the "normal" schedule. You can defer an acceptance for a year so that would allow you to have peace of mind during your break year. Secondly, it would be very difficult to apply while abroad.

 

[TigerLilies]

Hey everyone,

I'm currently a sophomore and am looking ahead to the coming years. I was thinking about not taking the mcats until august before senior year, and then spend a year after college with a service corps. Anyone have any comments on whether or not this is a good idea? Anyone done this? Any recommendations on service organizations, ie mercy corps or jesuit volunteer corps? Thanks for all of your help.

I think that is a terrific idea. Perhaps, you could schedule your interviews to be at a time when you are in the US? I don't know how this works. If not you could also defer. But if you are even thinking about taking a year off, I think it is a fanastic idea, if you are going to do something worthwhile with your time.

I am a freshman in college now. But I skipped a grade in school, and so I deferred going to college for a year. I'm really passionate about AIDS and so spent the year in India and Tanzania working on developing an AIDS peer education program for schools with UNICEF and traveled to rural schools as a peer educator. During this time, I managed to make connections with faculty here at Harvard, and so will be returning again to Tanzania this summer to do anthropology field research on AIDS in rural Tanzania. I really think my year off was one of the best decisions I've ever made and I've certainly learned more in that year than any textbook could possibly teach.

 

[SanDiegoSOD]

I always planned for a year off, which I will begin in a few months, but now I regret not applying already. Sure, I think I'll end up doing something cool over the next year (probably an internship in DC, a very cool city to be 21 in 😉), but at this point I wish I could be getting this long journey started. Undergrad is almost over, and I'm not nearly as burnt out as everyone told me I would be. I think a month or two in Europe prior to matriculation in medical school would have been enough break for me.