Medical Should I apply MD/PhD without taking a gap year?

[TheBoneDoctah]

I am currently a junior at Caltech. Before Covid, I was planning to apply to mdphd this year and matriculate straight from college. However, all of my clinical volunteering and shadowing stopped due to the pandemic. I have a good GPA and MCAT (3.98, 522). Additionally, I have been doing research in one lab at my school since my freshman year (March 2019), and I did two summer fellowships there (last summer was only dry lab). I did get into the NYU SURP program, but that was canceled due to Covid. Right now, on top of my bioinformatics research at my school's lab, I am currently doing wet lab research at another lab near where I am living due to virtual classes.

Unfortunately, I do not have any posters or papers to show for my work as my PI is brand new and has not published any papers at my school yet. However, I can talk extensively about my research and had a good deal of autonomy with it.

While my clinical experience is lacking (around 25 hours of shadowing, 50 hours of volunteering), I was wondering what my chances are at a top 25 program. Thank you in advance for your help and input!

You are going to need to get the experience numbers up (both clinical and non). Your GPA/MCAT is awesome though.

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[lord999]

Agree with above. If you want to continue on the PhD path for bioinformatics, then you should apply to one of the NLM institutions even over the top 25.

NLM's University-based Biomedical Informatics and Data Science Research Training Programs

www.nlm.nih.gov

Stanford and UCSD are CA, but depending on what you might want to do, HST (Harvard/MIT), Yale, Pittsburgh, and Vanderbilt carry strong programs.

 

[AlteredScale]

MD/PhD programs understand that you will not have as much clinical experience as others. But agree that you might need a little more. The MAIN focus of these MSTP programs is to train physician scientist who want a career in RESEARCH, not in clinical medicine. Your research experiences are strong. I am wondering however how you have not been an author on any posters or papers since being in this lab since freshman year, even with a newer PI there's always at least something happening year round even if it is submitting abstracts to the university research conference or local/regioanl conferences.