WAMC + School list Help (3.94/525)

[astrophage]

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I am a US citizen attending University of Florida as a senior and am planning on applying during the upcoming 26/27 cycle. I am interested in applying broadly, but am aiming for UF, FAU, USF, and UMiami. I am interested in Stanford because of their innovative culture and flexible curriculum, but mainly at schools in Florida because this is where I intend to practice in the future.

- 3.94 cGPA 3.95 sGPA
- 525 (131/130/132/132)
- Florida, US citizen
- White male
- Senior @ University of Florida, Chemical Engineering (gap year to apply)
- LM 82

Clinical Experience:
- 2 years of paid scribing in the ER, 2000 hours by time of applying. Generally what you would think when seeing scribing as an EC. I have many meaningful moments with patients outside of typical responsibilities that solidified my 'Why Medicine.'
Research:
- 1500 hours of research in synthetic biology by time of applications. 1 mid author pub, 3 poster presentations (2 at school level, 1 international)
- Best Poster Award at a prestigious conference in my major at the international level
- Large grant to fund research for my senior thesis
- Work relates to pushing boundaries of medicine through novel antibiotic development and enzyme characterization

Shadowing:
- 75 hours of shadowing (NSGY, IM, and orthopedics). I am trying to get more, but I think this combined with clinical has given me a good idea of the everyday demands of medicine and life as a physician.

Non-clinical volunteering:
- 250 hours volunteering at a thrift shop in rural PA over summers since high school
- 165 hours volunteering at a thrift shop & homeless shelter in my local town, inspired by work above
- 125 hours of volunteering with a local pre-health honor society chapter, this is not focused on one group/population, but spread out around many different causes, so less impactful to me and less hours. Big leadership position though.

Other extracurricular activities:
- 3 different directorship positions in my local pre-health honor society chapter. These were in outreach volunteering with local farms, pre-health student development through educational seminars, Q&A sessions with medical professionals, and inviting a prominent pre-health application advisor to speak with us, and fundraising, raised $35,000 for our charity with this. (~180 hours combined)
- Part-time job working in clinical trial design & management for a company which works with the FDA & medical device startups to bring devices to market. I meet regularly with physicians and engineering teams who are building these devices and work with them to design clinical trials that will gather the data they need. Have worked with institutions such as HSS, UPenn, NYU, Ohio State, & Vanderbilt. This job carries a lot of responsibility and has exposed me to the innovation side of medicine. (500 hours).
- Calculus II TA for 1 semester (50 hours)
- Organic Chemistry II TA for 2 semesters (120 hours)
- Assisted in developing a new teaching lab for the ChemEng department with a prof. over the summer & advocated for more biotech-centric experiments. This included ordering the equipment, building, testing, writing the theory manual & standard operating procedure (120 hours). I now TA for this lab (60 hours).
- Internship with a Fortune-200 engineering & utility company, included working with 2 teams to build an automated prediction algorithm which will save upwards of $3 million per year and many hours of saved time. (480 hours, full-time over 12 weeks).
- Part time Chick-Fil-A since junior year of HS -> freshman & sophomore year of college, front of house worker (1000 hours)
- Hobbies (photography & weightlifting). Difficult to project? Maybe 1000 since 2020?

Relevant honors or awards
- 2x winner of prestigious departmental award
- President's list x4, Dean's List x10
- Full-tuition scholarship
- Graduating Summa Cum Laude
- Presidential Service Award
- Possible commencement speaker, other graduation awards

LORs:
- Science Professor that I designed teaching lab with, likely strong. (1st STEM letter)
- Head of ChemEng department, previous professor, knows me pretty well (2nd STEM letter)
- PI, supports my work, likely strong. (Research letter)
- French professor, unsure how strong, I have not taken many 'non-stem' classes (Non-STEM)
- Physician letter from scribing, hopefully strong (Physician letter)
- Letter from CEO of my medical device design job, super strong (Job/additional letter)

My Journey To Medicine
I previously made a WAMC. I estimated my MCAT at the time and projected some hours. The hours above are my final projections.

My 'Why Medicine' has also changed since my first WAMC. When I was young, my mother and I lived in France, my first real introduction to medicine was when she dealt with receding gums. We tried to get treatment in the USA, but it was unaffordable. She underwent a clinical trial in France and over this process I was able to see how her doctors leveraged innovative technologies with empathetic care to walk her through the healing process. My French was significantly better so I played a role by translating.

Moving back to the USA, my interest in medicine was nurtured by shadowing a neurosurgeon over a week, I was enthralled by his synthesis of technology, dexterity, and intimate knowledge of the body to help someone walk again. I continue to pursue this through scribing, and eventually found my way to clinical trials, where I am able to synthesize my passion for medicine and background in engineering to bring new treatments to the bedside. However, I am in the background right now. The doctors I work with are on the frontlines, understanding this technology while simultaneously bringing it to those who need it and advocating for them. I need a medical education to do this.

20 years from now, I see myself contributing the medical community by working at an academic institution, integrating an engineering mindset with patient care to bring novel solutions to people dealing with chronic illness. At the same time, I hope to play an active role in healthcare policy, advocating for insurance and system reform to reduce the financial burden that many patients face once their treatment is complete.

School List: (recommendations on schools to remove would be helpful!)
UF
UMiami
USF
FAU
FSU
FIU
UCF
NSU (MD)
Duke
Vanderbilt
Northwestern
Emory
Harvard (Pathways/HST)
Stanford
Johns Hopkins
NYU (Grossman)
Cornell
Mount Sinai
UChicago Pritzker
WashU St. Louis
UPenn Perelman
Columbia Vagelos
CWRU
Pitt
UVA
Albert Einstein
UCSF
Colorado Anschutz
Iowa
OSU COM
Carle-Illinois
Alice L. Walton
USC Keck
Dartmouth Geisel
Yale SOM
Mayo Clinic Alix

 

[polymerization]

I really can't imagine anyone could ask for more from you. Great job.

Continue to work on your narrative. Periodontal disease is within the realm of dentistry, and the connections are a little overwrought into technology and medicine. One can easily say, with your chemical engineering background, that an easier transition into biomedical engineering could satisfy you. There is very little actual patient interaction in your profile (within the context of a scribe's ordinary scope), so it makes sense that you are not engaging with your passion for medicine from that vantage, but that's usually a genre requirement.

Personally, I think what adcoms are truly looking for is a cohesive story of moral development. Of course, there are things you did along the way to training as a physician, but we aren't all born with a passion for medicine. It can feel convenient to externalize and depersonalize that interest into non-emotional aspects of the career to avoid coming across vulnerable. But ultimately, medicine is a position of authority amongst serious vulnerability, and I think schools are looking for people who will be good stewards.

I think it's important to orient your story around the patient experience. For example, when you're talking about helping someone walk again, you might want to focus on the restoration of quality of life to someone with their own potential and accomplishments foregone due to disease. When you frame everything around how you are extracting from the environment (I learned x, y, z from a, b, c experiences), you come across like someone who knew all of the right things to do, but largely missed the point.

It's really hard because being morally serious without leaning performative, self-important, or melodramatic is genuinely hard with the number of characters you have in the PS. But that's the whole assignment.

For what it's worth, UF's secondary is super psychoanalytic in form and I have a feeling they will love that framing. I would say Duke, Emory, UCSF, Dartmouth, Sinai, Columbia are also more cerebral that way, too. You'll see what I mean once you start working on secondaries.

I would say remove the schools you know you wouldn't attend. NSU, AWSOM fall well below baseline for you. I think you should be good at our state schools. USF will have a field day.

 

[astrophage]

I really can't imagine anyone could ask for more from you. Great job.

Continue to work on your narrative. Periodontal disease is within the realm of dentistry, and the connections are a little overwrought into technology and medicine. One can easily say, with your chemical engineering background, that an easier transition into biomedical engineering could satisfy you. There is very little actual patient interaction in your profile (within the context of a scribe's ordinary scope), so it makes sense that you are not engaging with your passion for medicine from that vantage, but that's usually a genre requirement.

Thank you! These last 4 years have been a lot but I am really looking forward to conveying what it all meant during this app cycle.
I agree with your concern about my narrative being periodontal/dentistry related and overwrought with the tech side, thank you for confirming! I've spent a few days clarifying my narrative.

I am going to keep the experience but focus most on my reflection, since this was my "seed." Without going into too much detail, we had to move back to the USA due to COVID, I worked through high school to help us make ends meet. Coming to university I managed to get a full ride and chose ChemE initially because of the financial upheaval of previous few years, but following an engineering internship and shadowing I fully committed due to various reasons that I will delve into in the PS. Following this I will reflect on patient interactions as a scribe and my clinical trial work to come to the conclusion of why the two matter for my "why" and my outlook on my future. To avoid it being overwrought with tech I hope to focus on how this applies to the patient experience from what I've observed over my time here.

It's really hard because being morally serious without leaning performative, self-important, or melodramatic is genuinely hard

Having been through this process, do you have any advice to offer on how to avoid the performative/self-important/melodramatic aspects?

Thank you for taking the time to read through this!

 

[astrophage]

@LizzyM @Goro, I would appreciate any notes you would have!

 

[polymerization]

Having been through this process, do you have any advice to offer on how to avoid the performative/self-important/melodramatic aspects?

From my experience... Give yourself more time than you think that you need, and then double it.

You will probably read your essays thousands of times. Where you are now, you're reading to figure out what you actually want to say. I would venture to guess that most people make cuts to fit the character limit and stop here, but I don't think that is sufficient.

I think after that comes reading for tone, coherence with your broader profile, and alignment with core competencies and mainstream values within medicine.

Once you're here, you realize your essays are overlong again, and getting quite dense. You realize that, while you do have a lot to say, you cannot necessarily say everything. You make cuts, which are actually very hard decisions, considering the stakes.

You will have days where you feel like the whole thing is ready, and you'll read it in 2 or 3 days and think "did I really write this garbage" and toss the whole thing in the trash and start over. Ad nauseam.

You may have several human reviewers who have agreed to read your writing and, of course, all have different ideas about what you should write about and ways for you to improve. It is absolutely crucial that they all contradict one another so that you have no idea what to do. You may agonize for some period of time before you realize whatever it is that you are insisting on saying is not worth risking rejection, and so you scrap everything.

You will almost certainly run your writing through every AI out there and have it say that you are the next Shakespeare. It will toy and tinker with your writing and you'll start to recognize that whatever it added now sounds obviously robotic and throw it all out again.

You'll probably read other people's essays and feel that they're all kind of the same and not helpful in the same way you imagined it might be. You'll roll your eyes at the 8th essay about someone's sense of exclusion because their classmates commented on the smell of their ethnic lunch at school and now they want to be a doctor.

But doing all of this over and over again, you start to internalize little bits and pieces. You'll mentally come to an understanding of the things that you want to say, and what you certainly do not. You'll start to figure out the places where you are most likely to overreach and tone those parts down.

I think there is no easy answer here. The writing process is awful, especially if you are the typical person who is not used to writing for high-stakes academic selection processes. I kept returning to this video in particular, which helped me internalize what the evaluator's frame is on a more conceptual level.

There will come a point, weeks if not months later, where you'll feel uneasy, but satisfied with what you have. You'll have read and tinkered enough times to know that every word on the page is communicating something, but it doesn't come across like you're trying to win a Pulitzer. You'll read it a couple of days later and you'll still feel that way about it, especially combined with the rest of your application.

That's when you know you've landed on a solid set of essays.

 

[Mr.Smile12]

For more actionable steps to take to writing, get used to reflective writing.

Here's a video series about writing a narrative (directed to school kids, don't be offended)


1) Start journaling. You don't have to write a novel each day/night. Start with 50-60 words.

2) Use the AAMC Anatomy of the Applicant workbook to think about ideas that highlight your preprofessional competencies.

3) Use the AAMC Anatomy of the Applicant to think about MORE vignettes that fit each competency focus.

4) Write outlines or responses to secondary essay prompts for the schools you want to attend. (We do this in Becoming a Student Doctor.)

5) Compare what you wrote in your secondaries to what is left in your AAMC Anatomy workbook or journal.

6) Answer the obvious questions that people will ask you: As a non-traditional student, show/tell us the value your immediate past post-college experiences bring to medicine and your medical school peers. Show/tell us that you have momentum in your pivot to medicine/a health care career.

The important part is to consistently take time to do each of these steps (generally sequentially). Give yourself 15 minutes to write without interruption and let ideas flow. (Playing instrumental "study music"... if that helps, great.) It's about giving yourself the mental habits and comfort to write about your journey, your dreams, and your story arc.

Analogy: try learning to sing.

 

[mike-sheree]

SLIGHTLY, off topic. I have practiced in Florida for a long time.(1977 MD U of Ill now retired). This does not apply as much to medical school, but if you are firmly decided at the time that you want to practice in Florida, I would urge you to strongly consider your residency/fellowship be in Florida. A strong showing at a strong school in Florida would certainly not hurt getting a competitive residency/fellowship in Florida. Contacts are very important in this business-and it is a business.