To gap year or not to gap year

[anxiousanonymous]

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Hello All,
First time poster here—I’m a 20y/o male with a 3.88 gpa in Oregon going into my junior year. I’m freaking out, frankly I feel like I’m f&?ked. I spent my first 2 years of college kindof messing about, I joined a fraternity but didn’t do leadership, and although I got my EMT cert I haven’t been able to get a job yet. I have 175 hospital volunteering hours from highschool, was president of my college’s Red Cross club and got around 50 community service hours there, and I have worked a number of jobs valeting, working on cars, and wildland firefighting. I’m feeling like I’m so far behind reading threads where students have thousands of clinical hours and research—I have neither, I’m trying desperately to get into a lab but I’m not confident it’s going to happen this year. I have a tentative offer to come aboard as an EMT at a local agency but still closing the loop, not a guarantee by any means. These are my questions:

Should I prioritize the EMT side of things or should I try to commit to 2 years of a lab where I would have to work 40 hrs/week during the summer effectively preventing accumulation of EMT hours?

Do I need to take a gap year?

When should I take the MCAT?

And lastly, partially a joke but partially seriously, am I f$?ked? (If my goal is an MD)

With gratitude,
Anxiousanonymous

 

[Mr.Smile12]

1) Have you talked with your prehealth advisors? What sort of research are you interested in? You haven't even told us what your major is.

2) What shadowing have you done?

3) What is your purpose as a physician? Stop reading others' profiles as "the template" because their purpose may not align with yours.

4) Nothing wrong with taking a gap year as long as you have a plan for what you intend to do. If you already took 2 years of college messing around, the growth/gap year phase better not be more messin'.

 

[anxiousanonymous]

Hello Mr. Smile,
Thank you for your thoughtful reply—

1. I have talked with college advisors some but never a dedicated prehealth advisor. My major is multidisciplinary science and I’m in the honors college working on a capstone project related to medical devices in prehospital care but it’s becoming apparent that much more than a literature review isn’t all that viable. In terms of research I’m much more interested in working with patients than doing lab work.

2. I have shadowed a hand surgeon 8hrs, but I’m currently reaching out and expect to shadow ER docs, Gen surgery docs, a neurologist, and a cardiologist at a minimum.

3. I don’t have a specialty I’ve nailed down but I really love solving puzzles and making people feel cared for. I would love to work as a family doctor or in internal medicine where I build long lasting relationships with patients and do work on the day-to-day figuring out what is causing symptoms/problems and what can be done to help. I do, though, worry that this may be a sector of medicine vulnerable to AI/PA expansion.

4. I take it a gap year will be necessary—in your opinion, should I aim for research or EMT now? Given that research is more open to younger student who are around longer, I’m thinking research but I’m of course open to thoughts. The gap will of course be spent diligently working towards medical school. FWIW, I wasn’t even really aware I was slacking—perhaps more dangerously, I was deluding myself into believing I was doing enough, but to be fair, I tackled Ochem freshman year with A’s in lab and a mix of A’s and high B’s in lecture.

 

[polymerization]

There is no date at which you are somehow ineligible to apply to medical school. You can't really control what/when schools choose to accept you, but you can control your preparation to maximize your chances to the best of your ability. You should do all of it: research, clinical experience, nonclinical volunteering, leadership, service orientation activities, and so on. Do not assume that giving them "your best" based on what opportunities you have available right now will be enough.

Of course you will not be able to do all of these at once, and of course you will not be able to identify opportunities precisely when you need them. You have to organize and manage your time, plan what activities fit where, identify possible opportunities that meet that requirement, stagger them so you are not drowning and can keep up on any academic stuff you have going on, and execute on that plan successfully to the point where you could have a positive reference from those activities.

There is no reason to limit yourself to a single gap year as if the time passing is curative by itself, nor should you imagine that activities are closed off from you on account of age. You are very young. I found research opportunities in my late 20s, and many of my colleagues at school are in their mid and late 30s who also performed research amongst the undergrads.

You should FIRST stack your longitudinal activities and only THEN take the MCAT between January - March of your application year. That will give you plenty of time prior to the application opening in May to retake it if necessary.

Do NOT take the MCAT prior to your activities because what ends up happening is that you realize it takes longer than you think and you inevitably feel pressure to apply prematurely because your score is expiring and you forgot everything.

Almost always, you'd end up reapplying and being in worse shape, because you would have to retake and show that your reapplication is better than the initial one, which, of course, conflicts with studying for the retake, actually taking it, and may not agree with your timeline.

You should know that the end of one application cycle basically marks the beginning of the next, so admissions is a continuous, 365 days/year kind of thing. You can be waiting to hear back from schools into the next contiguous cycle, so some people don't even know if they will be reapplicants by the time the next cycle opens.

You will find some people start preparing if they are not getting interview invites by late November, and then if they have not received acceptances by mid-February to mitigate the risk of basically sitting on your hands and waiting, to avoid an additional unintentional gap year to wait for the next cycle to end.

A friendly side note: do not talk about midlevel encroachment or doubts about your commitment to medicine on the basis of AI. They may be real to you, they're certainly real to all of us—but you do not want to give the impression that you're still considering a career in medicine. You want to come across as decisive and committed.

I know this is a lot, but you can do this if you really want it. You do not need to be a super genius. You just have to refuse to fail.

 

[jvquarterback]

Take the MCAT when you’re ready. Not before but don’t worry too much about taking it too early either. If you stay on top of things you’ll be fine in a year or two with a score from next spring.

If you’re done with all the pre reqs and can dedicate time this year to clinical hours, MCAT, and some volunteering I don’t think you need to do a gap year but you’ll have to squeeze a lot in this year. If not you may need a gap year.

Don’t worry too much about the research. Unless it’s really what you want, and how can you know if you haven’t done it? you don’t really need it. If you’re really sweating over it find somewhere to do something clinical.