- Joined
- Jun 11, 2010
- Messages
- 72,623
- Reaction score
- 115,667
Take the gap year and improve your app. Internationals need to be superstars.Hello,
I applied this past cycle and haven't gained any acceptance yet. I am currently sitting on two post II rejections and two unknowns. I am not being hopeful about the remaining two so I am preparing for a reapp.
On my primary:
numbers: cGPA/sGPA: 3.9, MCAT: 513 (with low CARS), and 517 (increased CARS to 126)
research: 4000 hours, 2 poster presentations, one middle author paper in science
Clinical volunteering: 80 hours with psychiatric patients in underserved region, and 80 hours of unfinished EMT training (will not put on a reapp)
Shadow: 60 hours in psych
Non-clinical volunteering: 250 hours working with a non-profit summer-camp organization for cancer families
leadership: outreach coordinator in the camp organization, president in sorority
Submitted app early enough, but not first day secondaries open kind of early. Applied to 40 ish schools that accept international students. Did a lot of updates to the schools but received minimal response.
What I have worked on this past year and the hours that will be completed by this June (can prob put more than completed because of projected hours):
Clinical volunteering: 200 hours in ER as hospital volunteer, lots of patient contact and patient advocacy related work
shadow: 10 hours with ER physician
Non-clinical: 100 hours in a sexual assault advocacy organization as helpline volunteer, 40 hours with animal shelter
research: one more poster presentation, a published second-author paper in a decent neuroscience journal, currently working on a first author paper (not so positive whether will be published by June)
I am just wondering if I would be ready by June or if I should take another year off and apply in 2020. I am currently working full-time in human research (we do clinical procedures on healthy participants, but research focus is basic science, therefore I listed this as non-clinical on my primary), so I plan to either get a full-time or part-time clinical job for next year (actively applying currently), which would lead to around 1000 + clinical hours. My concern of reapplying right away would be that I pretty much exhausted the schools that would take international students, and would be considered a reapplicant in almost every single school I choose to reapply to, so if I am not strong enough, I would like to hold off. The advantage of reapplying right away would be that I don't have to do a master's in 2020 for the sake of buying more time for myself. As an international student, I am only allowed to work in the US for three years post-degree, and I am currently on my year 2 already. It is also possible that I just sucked so bad at interviews, because my number of interviews is few but not zero, so it may not be a bad idea to try again right away given that I am able to identify what the hell is really going on with my interviews and fix the issues.
I sincerely thank anyone in advance for giving me constructive advice.
Stats get you to the door, but ECs get you through it.
