WAMC + School List: URM (3.6/516) - Service Heavy applicant

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Micas01

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Hi all! I'm hoping to get help with my school list. Do you think I should add some more “safeties”?
I’m concerned my list is too top-heavy, and I mostly based it on admit.org

cGPA and sGPA as calculated by AMCAS or AACOMAS: cGPA/sGPA: 3.61/3.6
MCAT score(s): 1st attempt - 512 (127/129/128/128); 2nd attempt - 516 (129/127/130/130)
State of residence: CA
Ethnicity and/or race: Black male
Undergraduate institution or category: Ivy League (Double major in Human Bio & History)

Clinical experience (volunteer and non-volunteer): (~1700+hrs)
1500+ hours paid: Worked as a medical scribe in an orthopedic clinic over the summer during college, then as a billing assistant in an OBGYN clinic the next summer, then as a medical assistant for a few months post-grad
~120 hours medical/clinical volunteer experience as a social worker at a hospital

Research experience and productivity: ~80hrs
Unpaid ~80 hours in a biomedical lab during the last year of undergrad

Shadowing experience and specialties represented: ~120hrs
120hrs split through: Family Practice, Colorectal Surgery, OBGYN, and Preventive Medicine

Non-clinical volunteering: (~400hrs)
250 hrs as a lead in a global mental health club working with children in Nairobi, 120hrs as a tutor, 50hrs volunteering in a soup kitchen

Other extracurricular activities: (3000+hrs)
2700+ hrs-Gap year and through college worked for an academic and college consulting business I started for underrepresented students. Partner with non-profits and other school programs.
500+ hrs- Club sport captain

LORs:
1 public health professor (strong)
1 physician for whom I scribed (strong)
1 STEM professor (weak)


Anything else not listed you think might be important
Overall, my application revolves around public health and social determinants of health, as I did not do much research due to focusing on community-service activities instead.
Two-year gap year program was interrupted after only a few months when I had to return home to care for my chronically ill mother.
I wrote a bit about how I got very ill (hospitalized for almost a week), only a couple of weeks before my 2nd MCAT retake.

School List:
Harvard, Stanford, UCSF, Columbia, Yale, NYU Grossman, University of Michigan, UCLA, Weill Cornell, University of Pittsburgh, Emory, Icahn at Mount Sinai, UChicago (Pritzker), UCSD, Brown, Boston University, Hofstra, USC (Keck), Albert Einstein, Dartmouth (Geisel), University of Rochester, UC Irvine, UC Davis, UMass, Tufts, Georgetown, New York Medical College, Drexel, UC Riverside, George Washington, University of Arizona (Phoenix).


So yeah, please please help 🙏
I wanna add some more like asap if I need to, as I just finished submitting secondaries to all of these schools except the ones I haven’t received yet (UPitt, UCI, UC Davis)

THANK YOU ALL 🙂
 
Last edited:
Welcome to the forums.

I don't consider your 400 hours that "service heavy." 250 hours were not focused on the United States, right? Your food bank hours are nominal, and tutoring is tutoring. You are competing against candidates who have spent at least a gap year doing service (so, 2000+ hours). It looks like you spent your gap year with your non-profit, but it's an extension of your showing academic mastery or accomplishment.
 
You could add any of these schools to your application:
Miami
Tulane
Cincinnati
Kaiser
Jefferson
Northwestern
Thank you for the help! I appreciate the time you put into it. I was also considering Kaiser, but was unsure because it is so new.
 
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