Welcome to the forums.
Have you lived in Ohio most of your life before going to California for college? Are you currently teaching in Ohio or California? What specialties are represented in your shadowing?
Have you attended any recruitment fairs or interacted with admissions representatives? How much is your prehealth office helping you, and what letters of recommendation have been secured?
As an Ohio resident, all of your public in-state programs should be on the table. GPA might be lower than the midrange for Case (or any T20s), but depending on your mission, they may still be interested. So that said, what is your mission as a physician? You have a lot of psych/mental health so I don't know why you wouldn't want to pursue clinical psych, though I suspect you have an answer.
I think a bit more food pantry volunteering will help raise your profile, but what you have should put your application in play; the question is whether your profile is enough for an interview.
Lived in OH before going to CA for school, returned to OH to work full time at the psych hospital initially then at a research facility. Specialties include Pathology, Peds, Derm, looking to shadow a surgeon as well.
No interaction w/ adcoms or my prehealth office. 5 LoRs secured from two science profs, a mentor (MD), my PI, and a doctor I shadowed (MD). Also considering asking an LoR from one of my psych profs. I have strong (multi-year, personal life+work life mentoring) relations with all of these individuals except one science prof and the possible psych prof.
Honestly haven’t pinned down my mission as a physician. From my teaching job, my experience in psych, hospice volunteering, and my research, I see how much $$+social support systems (Family, community, minority status) affects an individual’s QoL and increasing accessibility of medicine is really important to me - also reaching PoC populations is something I’m extremely interested in, just from stigma I’ve seen in my own community as an ethnic minority and how I understand this to play an even stronger role in other PoC populations. I was actually very interested in civil rights movements and founded an interfaith club in highschool, but this drifted off my radar a bit when I traveled to a more diverse and tolerant area for undergrad. Also, I really enjoyed research even though I didn’t get that involved until last year, and I really want to contribute to something stronger and more cutting edge in academia. That just comes from a feeling of wanting to give something unique to myself and new to the world, as well as how much I enjoyed the last couple of pubs/research work.
Mental health is a theme in my app. I think through my work in it I learned the advantage that socioeconomic status and a support system can have in an individual's life, and I also just realized that I want to be a well-adjusted doctor and a more compassionate/sensitive doctor. I learned firsthand how burnout can add up in an individual’s life, and how to speak out against stigma and recognize patterns in unhealthy social structures - especially in my own ethnic group. I learned really strong skills in motivational interviewing and believe that I am able to be more personable overall as a result of it. So, I learned a lot of really important things due to my experience in psych that I want to carry over into my work as a doctor. But I don’t want to be a psychiatrist!!! Because I also learned through my research and watching psychiatrists work in my psych job that I want to work with hard sciences more, and medication seems too much like a blunt instrument for a more ‘fine’ issue. I don’t expect the rest of medicine to be much more refined than that, but I guess I just think a field like neurology, surgery, cardiology, etc. would be more concrete and interesting to me. Hence my desire to shadow a surgeon. Sorry for the spaghetti writing, just getting my thoughts out there.
