Potential Reapplicant Texan ORM

[MrMangos]

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Hello guys,
Today I found out that I got waitlisted into the only school I interviewed at. I would appreciate any feedback and or suggestions on what I can improve on for the next cycle. Also would it be crazy to submit DO applications right now before this cycle concludes?

School list
Applied to every school on TMDSAS, no OOS schools. II from SHSU-COM, rest were pre-II rejections.

Stats

• cGPA ~3.69
• sGPA ~3.60
• MCAT ~511 One attempt with score breakdown of 129/124/130/128
• Casper ~First quartile

Research

• 288 hours at the Nanotech Institute in my undergraduate college researching artificial muscles (No poster/presentation). These hours were accumulated over the course of one year.

Clinical Experience

• 380 hours volunteering as a hospice volunteer for a year and a half.
• 228 hours volunteering at a nursing home also for about a year and a half. Visited residents and assisted them with basic healthcare-related requests.
• 66 hours shadowing a pain management anesthesiologist.

Community Engagement

• 234 hours volunteering at a hospice firm.
• 114 hours of hosting activities at nursing home.

Employment

• 15 hours per week as a Math tutor for kids from kindergarten all the way to 10th grade. Started the position about 3 months before submitting primary.

Leadership

• 150 hours as a Biopsychology TA (One semester).
• Coordinated my own event at the nursing home. I pitched my idea to the administrator and got a $200 budget to work with.
• Math tutor for 3 months.
• Online gaming event coordinator for about 2 years. Helped coordinate and promote giveaways in the game to foster a sense of community.

Academic Recognition

• Dean's list one semester, senior year.

Hobbies

• Gaming
• Fishing
• 8 ball pool
• Badminton
• Weight training

Recommendation Letters

• HPAC Committee letter
• Anesthesiologist I shadowed
• O-chem professor I took for two semesters
• Molecular and cell biology lab professor
• Biopsychology professor that I TA'd for
• Activity director at nursing home
• Hospice volunteer coordinator

Other Important Info

• Upward GPA trend in my junior and senior year
• I submitted my primary June 11th and it was processed July 15th. Most of my secondaries were submitted late July - early August.
• A red flag I had in my application was withdrawals from most of my classes in my second semester freshman year. I was transparent about this experience, talked about it in one of my essays, and demonstrated growth from it.
• In my gap year I am still employed as a math tutor (Gained 600 more hours), kept volunteering at the nursing home (Gained 144 more hours), hospice firm (Gained 108 more hours), visited hospice patients (Gained 180 more hours), and continued to host activities for residents (Gained 40 more hours). I coordinated another event at the nursing home that involved my friend who cosplays as Darth Vader to visit nursing home residents that are Star Wars fans.
• Last month started learning Spanish. I am also fluent in Arabic.
• I have indirect ties to the East Texas region as per UT Tyler.
• I had my personal statement, personal characteristics, and unique life experience essays read over by five different people. Three of them are doing residency and one of them recently matriculated. My activity descriptions and some of my secondaries were reviewed by three people.

 

[Med Ed]

Some things you should consider before reapplying:

1. None of the things you listed under leadership are actually leadership. TA = employment. Math tutor = employment. Online gaming event coordinator = coordination. Nursing home events = cute but really comes off as filler.
2. Shadowing one niche specialty is better than nothing, but it would help to get some hours observing something more general. Family medicine, pediatrics, anything.
3. Your division of hospice hours and nursing home hours into both clinical and "community engagement" categories is confusing. I don't know what volunteering at a hospice firm means.

It's pretty late in the game for 2026, but in addition to broadening your shadowing, two things that would help your application are (1) more traditional hospital volunteering, and (2) more traditional soup kitchen/homeless shelter volunteering. This would broaden your experiences beyond hospice and nursing home.

Also, five hobbies is about four more than you need for AMCAS.

 

[MrMangos]

Would I be able to frame my tutoring position as leadership experience? Due to the longevity of my role in this high turnover job, other tutors and quality coordinators regularly sought my advice on how to approach students’ educational needs.

Your division of hospice hours and nursing home hours into both clinical and "community engagement" categories is confusing. I don't know what volunteering at a hospice firm means.

This is my mistake. I meant to say I did administrative volunteering at the hospice office for the community engagement part. I categorized them this way because I served distinct roles in each activity. In the nursing home I hosted activities and visited residents around the facility, which I categorized as community engagement and clinical volunteering respectively.

What's the max amount of hobbies I should list?

 

[Med Ed]

Would I be able to frame my tutoring position as leadership experience? Due to the longevity of my role in this high turnover job, other tutors and quality coordinators regularly sought my advice on how to approach students’ educational needs.

No, that's just called having a job.

This is my mistake. I meant to say I did administrative volunteering at the hospice office for the community engagement part. I categorized them this way because I served distinct roles in each activity. In the nursing home I hosted activities and visited residents around the facility, which I categorized as community engagement and clinical volunteering respectively.

The impression this gives is that you're experiences are rather light, and you know they are rather light. So you carve things up to create more entries and hope the reviewers don't notice. I think this would be a more honest appraisal of what you have:

Research
Nanotech Institute

Clinical
Hospice
Shadowing

Non-Clinical
Nursing Home

Employment
Math Tutor
TA

What's the max amount of hobbies I should list?

I would pick one. I suspect that applicants sometimes think listing lots of hobbies will make them look interesting. Unless they have an otherwise very strong application, it actually makes them look unwilling to prioritize the work necessary to get into medical school.

 

[Mr.Smile12]

We're focused on a reapp since you could still get an offer. But it's smart that you plan now.

If you listed five hobbies on a resume, I would question your seriousness as a professional.

I see five hobbies and no community service orientation activities. You are doing a lot with hospice, but it is still clinic-adjacent in the way you interact with clients/patients. You don't specify your responsibilities (e.g., if you had a hypothesis-based research project), so I hope it's clearer in your application. Hosting events at your hospice is not the service orientation activity that moves the needle; while there is some value in hosting events like a health fair, that's not service orientation (it could be leadership).

In short, I see you trying to "fill space" that could be better used for your service orientation and commitment to improving your community overall (not just in health). If this description represents your TMDSAS application (and future AMCAS), I can surmise the lack of service orientation screened you out at most schools.