I discovered this forum today and wanted to see what some people with more experience thought. I am a Biochemistry/Bible double major currently preaching full time. I'm 19 about to enter my 3rd year with enough hours to be classified a senior after graduating from high school a year early. I am very involved with the Social clubs and professional clubs at the school I attend and spend a ton of time visiting the sick and the nursing homes. I am involved in foreign missions. But, my GPA will be around a 3.3 after this semester because last semester I was hospitalized and missed a week of classes (review week for finals). If I can score in the mid 30's on my MCAT and get my GPA to around a 3.4-3.5 will I be competitive?
Med schools get as many as 10,000 applications for 150 spots, so they expect
everything to be solid. There should be no expectation that one strong stat can make up for a bad one -- the whole sliding scale notion is one created by premeds and doesn't really fly for adcoms. I agree with the prior poster who said graduating early will not be regarded as a positive, nor will double majoring. The dude who has a single major, takes 4 years and gets A's has a much better stat for adcoms than the one who finishes in 3 years with a dual major and a B+ average, sorry. Your ECs will all look good, but you MUST get some clinical exposure. Look at it as a prerequisite for medical school. If you haven't gotten out there and volunteered or worked, or at least significantly shadowed in a medical setting, you won't be looked at seriously by med schools. Visiting nursing homes probably won't count, unless you are visiting them with a physician to provide care. Nor should you feel like you are ready to launch into a career, without having really researched what doctors do all day. Seeing it from a patient perspective, while perhaps good to talk about in a PS (although it has been done to death), does not count. Having family members in the field doesn't count. Actually getting out there and spending the time working with doctors in a hospital, and getting direct patient exposure in a health care, not convalescent context, is what counts. because adcoms want to make sure you know what you are getting into, and not end up one of the rare first year casualties who realizes, after $40k in loans, that medicine isn't for them, or what they thought it was going to be. You have to look before you leap, on this road.
So you need to spend the time both to do a decent amount of health related ECs, and to pull your GPA up, and to study more for the MCAT. Getting a 28ish on practice tests is meaningless, because many people hit a wall around that number. Until you are scoring mid 30s on multiple, full length tests, you have no business talking about scoring mid 30s. And actually most people tend to score within 3 points, plus OR MINUS what they are scoring on full length practice tests. So you might really be tracking to score a 25 at this point. Most people who come onto SDN and say "assume" I score mid 30s don't do close to that target. Don't become one of those statistics. Assume nothing, until you get that score report.
My suggestion would be not to graduate early and to spend the time you need pulling that GPA up and studying like a maniac for the MCAT, and spend a few hours/week getting the clinical experience you desperately need. The average these days is a 3.6/30 and you are kind of tracking to come in short of that right now. So you have some work to do. You can get there, and your interesting background will help. But you must must must get the requisite clinical exposure or you won't make it, and once you get that exposure you might decide you don't even want this path.
