I read the forums over at Student Doctor Network fairly frequently (maybe once a day). In the few months I’ve been reading the posts, I’ve come to expect a few things. First, people are always going to worry about getting into medical school, no matter their scores, their letters of recommendation, or their extra-curriculars. After all, the people that actively seek out SDN are a self-selected group of pre-meds. They are, from what I can tell, more high-strung, overachieving, and competitive than the general population. (I’m not discounting myself from this pool, though I haven’t ever posted there.) Second, people forget their role. Fairly often, I’ll see people giving helpful advice (which I appreciate) as if they are channeling the Dean of Admissions at Medschool University (which I don’t).
Today, I came across this post, asking how an 8 in Verbal Reasoning will measure up. I had no reaction to the initial post, until I read this response.
I think it’s a lot more competitive than most people on SDN make it out to be. As long as the 30 is balanced, with decent letters, ugrad GPA, science GPA, a “normal personality”, an early application, and choosing a variety of medical schools, it’s really hard to be completely unsuccessful in a cycle.
(Emphasis added by me)
This is absolutely untrue. Even with the best scores and a balanced resume, the med school application process is a game of luck. There is no guarantee that any person will get into a school, and certainly no guarantee based on the MCAT. This person’s response was correct to say that having a well-rounded application, but is dead wrong about being unsuccessful. I would be surprised to find that someone starts out the process intending to fail, yet every year, hundreds if not thousands of young adults find themselves in exactly that situation.
An MCAT score above 35 will not get you in to med school. It just won’t. It’s about much more than one score.
When I received my MCAT score, I was thrilled. I thought it was my ticket into medical school. (I had the same excitement when I was accepted into my research internship at Columbia last summer.) I remember my uncle, a physician, telling me how proud he was. He said that it would essentially guarantee me a spot in a med school, though he told me my GPA was not quite high enough to allow me my pick of any institution.
Now, I realize that it isn’t enough to rely on one or even two strengths and hope for success. You really need to be a stellar applicant in every respect. If you are an applicant like that, congratulations. For the rest of us, if you do have a weakness, explain it briefly and honestly. My junior year, for example, I overextended myself in my extracurriculars (new organizations, new positions, MCAT prep, looking for a summer internship), and my grades suffered. Without an explanation, an admissions committee would see this semester as evidence that I couldn’t handle my academics in the face of stress, but they wouldn’t see that I refocused myself for senior year, and I came back having learned from my mistakes and made Dean’s List. It will just take a little honesty to neutralize a red flag in my app.
