- Joined
- Jan 15, 2015
- Messages
- 6
- Reaction score
- 1
Thank you for taking the time to help me.
To explain my gap year(s), after graduating, I got into substitute teaching and a teaching program which required a lot of studying and training so that's also why I didn't do any regular volunteering. After being a full-time substitute teacher since one of the teachers quit, I figured out that I didn't like teaching enough to give up research and medicine so that's when I got the scribe job and basically become a non-traditional pre-med. My decision was further solidified as it turned out that I love scribing and the medical field way more than I ever knew.
Well thank you for reading this. Despite my spiel, I'm fully prepared to be told why I'm completely wrong and I won't get defensive over it. I desperately need to be smacked into reality if I'm not currently in it. In summary, what I plan to do is continue working on improving The Partner Program and starting to volunteer at the boys and girls club and big brother big sisters to spread that learning theory and generally just helping kids. I personally don't think it's a good idea to start clinical volunteering because it would look fake and out of place with my theme and desires, but if that's what I should do please tell me why and I will. Thank you!
- Year in school - Graduated in May 2016 with Biochemistry
- State - Nevada
- Schools to which you are applying - UCLA b/c my SO is in LA (long distance right now), UNR/UNLV (Nevada state schools), don't know for the rest though.
- Cumulative GPA - 3.95 + honor's program
- Science GPA - 3.94
- MCAT - taking in May but plan to score 515+ if not 520+ (putting a lot of effort into it)
- Research – 1.5 years of 1020 hours. 2 posters (1 for senior thesis and 1 for a grant I won), a senior thesis paper, and one 2nd author publication.
- Volunteering (clinical) – 160 hours hospital volunteering on the nursing floor getting things for patients and talking to them especially if they're undergoing depression.
- Physician shadowing – 150 hours with a neurosurgeon; see employment history for scribing though.
- Non-clinical volunteering - Tutoring minorities at a high school ~100 hours where I was testing out the learning skills (explained in the ECs). I'm starting volunteering at the Boys and Girls Club in a month which I'll do about 4 hours/week so ~64 hours by when I apply, as well as Big Brothers Big Sisters for 1 hour per week so ~16 hours. I'll be applying my learning theory stuff to this. I know this is nearly worthless but please check out my ECs and reasoning as to why the majority of my time was spent on my two ECs.
- Extracurricular activities - This is my biggest selling point, the theme of myself, and why my volunteering hours are so low. I know it's long but you have to know the scope of it to really see I'm not some scrub with garbage volunteering hours trying to get into med school. Okay so 2.5 years ago I started an organization that focuses on teaching learning theory to struggling students; not just study skills but the actual cognitive skills that occur when you and I study to get that sweet A like visualizing, scaffolding, etc.. It was first spent on designing the website and the program in general which took considerable trial & error. Once my partner and I completed that, we started up a club in an LA high school (where my partner was going) called The Partner Program where we partner up students with a partner for those obvious benefits and have weekly sessions where they practice learning skills. Now it's expanding into SAT training and a tutoring module but still culminating around making these students better able to be self-sufficient relative to school. This took up a lot of my time throughout like 10-20 hours at first, eventually to 5-10 hours, and now 1-5 hours per week with a total of about 1250 hours by the time I apply. To be clear, it's ongoing as I'm constantly updating the website with new content like critical thinking, biases, memory skills, etc. as well as running the club. The assistant principle at that club can verify all this in a LoR of course since she's in the email chain. On the side, I was also working on a project to get professors to adopt the flipped classroom model of starting with video recordings of lectures and then more problem-solving sessions. I was never pre-med so I was always dabbling in my 3 passions of medicine, education, and research.
- EC #2 - Anyway, before that, from 2014-2015, I did a similar thing of starting another organization based on trying to end how some of our products come from child/slave labor. It involved making a website, researching the situation, talking with companies, awareness projects/presentations, etc. of about 20 hours a week (honestly) for a year so about 1000 hours too. My team and I at the time were deeply invested in this stuff but when I got the idea to start that stuff about the learning skills, I decided to put this on hold because this was such a crazy problem to tackle, we were having such difficulty trying to end the issue that many people have tried before even with our unique and new approaches, and the stuff about learning skills was working wonderfully. The website for this is still there of course though so there's no lack of proof. In conclusion, the reason why I did so much of this stuff is because I was never explicitly pre-med (decided to apply to med school last year) and I felt that putting my time into these passions had the chance of doing quite a lot more for humanity than just volunteering at a hospital or wherever, at the risk of accomplishing nothing of course lol. The future of this is to incorporate it into The Partner Program because we found the largest success in high schools and convincing kids to chose products with the Fairtrade label, but that will be after The Partner Program is fully developed with all of its modules.
- Employment history - employed by research lab for 1 year out of the 1.5 years I did, full-time substitute teacher for 7 months, and emergency department scribe (and training other scribes) since Aug 2017 to present which will be 3600 hours by June.
To explain my gap year(s), after graduating, I got into substitute teaching and a teaching program which required a lot of studying and training so that's also why I didn't do any regular volunteering. After being a full-time substitute teacher since one of the teachers quit, I figured out that I didn't like teaching enough to give up research and medicine so that's when I got the scribe job and basically become a non-traditional pre-med. My decision was further solidified as it turned out that I love scribing and the medical field way more than I ever knew.
Well thank you for reading this. Despite my spiel, I'm fully prepared to be told why I'm completely wrong and I won't get defensive over it. I desperately need to be smacked into reality if I'm not currently in it. In summary, what I plan to do is continue working on improving The Partner Program and starting to volunteer at the boys and girls club and big brother big sisters to spread that learning theory and generally just helping kids. I personally don't think it's a good idea to start clinical volunteering because it would look fake and out of place with my theme and desires, but if that's what I should do please tell me why and I will. Thank you!
