After obsessively checking your email every five minutes for weeks, the appearance of your first interview offer brings with it a flood of relief and excitement. All that studying, volunteering, and writing of countless secondary applications has earned you a coveted interview slot. Yet coming on the tail of such excitement is that sense of panic. What now?
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Top Factors to Consider When Comparing Medical Schools
Selecting a medical school is a significant decision, as the program you attend may play a key role in determining your career path. Whether you are completing final interviews or simply starting the application process, below are several factors to consider when comparing potential medical schools.
Location
The majority of applicants have a reasonable idea of the type of setting they would like to spend four years. In general, medical schools can be in urban and suburban settings. They are rarely rural. However, realize that the area a medical school is in affects more than your personal life and cost of living. Different geographic regions will expose you to different patient populations and disease processes. If you are extremely passionate about working with certain patients (e.g., the under-served urban poor), then take location heavily into account when choosing a program.
Partner Blog Spotlight: 5 Things I Wish I Had Known Before Becoming a Dentist
Mouthing Off is the official blog of the American Student Dental Association. ASDA members post three times each week on topics such as dental licensure, personal finance and student debt, dental school life and dentistry in pop culture. Mouthing Off is almost entirely student written with the occasional post by a dentist or financial expert. Whether you’re a predental trying to get into dental school or you’re a dental student looking for some career advice, Mouthing Off is a great resource to visit again and again. Here’s a taste of what you’ll find on Mouthing Off:
5 things I wish I had known before becoming a dentist
For fourth year dental students, graduation is just around the corner. In this post, the dentists who wrote “So You Want to be a Dentist?” offer some advice they wish they’d had before graduating dental school.
Fighting the Blank Page: Tips for Starting Your Personal Statement
I love writing but hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says, “You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, giftless. I’m not your agent and I’m not your mommy. I’m a white piece of paper, you wanna dance with me?” And I really, really don’t.
—Aaron Sorkin
You’ve overcome so much to make it this far. From surviving OChem and taking your MCATs to finding volunteer opportunities that demonstrate your passion for medicine, you have accomplished a great deal to get to the point of being able to fill out that AMCAS application. And yet, writing your personal statement can feel like the most painful hurdle in your path. Like Aaron Sorkin, creator of works such as The West Wing, The Social Network, and Moneyball, you just really, really don’t want to dance with that blank page. Even if you love to write and going to med school is just a temporizing measure until you publish the next great American novel, getting a handle on your personal statement can be challenging. With so much riding on 5300 characters (counting spaces!), how to get started?
Prepped: Reflections on a Stillbirth
There are some experiences you can’t prepare for by reading a textbook.
20 Questions: John Hunt, MD, Pediatric Pulmonology/Allergy/Immunology
Dr. John Hunt discusses his varied career as a pediatric asthma specialist, military physician, academic, novelist, and entrepreneur, and offers some advice for students.
Ten things I learned in medical school (Other than, you know, the medical stuff)
I learned a great deal during the preclinical years of medical school, much of which served me well during my clinical training (although I never found a practical use for memorizing the Krebs cycle beyond boards exams). Clinical training was a whole new world, filled with hidden lessons that I didn’t find in any of my textbooks.
10. Late is a four-letter word. Be on time; rounds do not wait for the medical student. A lot of being a third year med student is simply being there. When I was on my surgery clerkship, New York was hit by hurricane Sandy. The next day, we were all there for morning rounds. On time.
5 Strategies to Make the Most of Your MCAT Studying Efforts
For an exam as important and comprehensive as the MCAT, it’s vital to do everything you can to prepare in the most effective and efficient manner possible. Below are five strategies to maximize the value of your MCAT studying efforts.
If I Had a Million Dollars (But I Don’t)
Someday, after years of school (then more school) and residency training, we will start earning doctors’ salaries. In the meantime, finances can be tight, but there are ways to cut costs, optimize the money you do have, and maybe even bring in a little extra on the side.
There’s an old moniker you can’t change what you don’t acknowledge. It’s hard to make a budget if you don’t know what you’re spending currently. Take a few weeks and keep track, ideally a full month. Write down everything, regardless of how you pay for it – cash, check, credit card, bitcoin. . . Even if you have a 0% interest credit card and won’t be paying it off for a while, write it down. Then, consider your monthly income. If you’re ending the month in the black – congratulations! You’re on the right track. You may still want to decrease your expenses to reduce your overall loan burden. If you find your monthly cost of living exceeding your income, it is definitely worth your while to take a hard look at what you’re spending and how to cut back.
Six Ways to Make the Most of Your Summer
Make the most of your summer to round out your medical school applications.
Practical Advice for the Medical School Applicant
As students begin to prepare for the next cycle of medical school application, I want to review some of the practical pieces of advice that every applicant should know. The actual process of applying to medical school is resource intensive: it costs thousands of dollars, hundreds of hours, and will strip you of many relaxing weekends that you would have otherwise enjoyed. Since you’ve made the decision to apply, here are some things that will help you make the best of it.
Remember that your MCAT score is a number. Your GPA is a number. These two things make up a major component of your application and you can’t change either of them now. You can’t change your letters of recommendation, either. The personal statement is a modifiable aspect of your application at this point, so you want to make sure to do a good job on it. But what else is there?
The answer to this lies in the details. This is what separates a good application from an excellent application. It is also what could separate a marginal application from one that gets an interview invitation. Every year, there are a few key mistakes that really put some students at a disadvantage. When schools are looking to offer acceptances, they are not only looking for good students. In addition to being smart, they are looking for people who will one day care for patients and be their colleagues. It is no surprise that those selected to become student doctors are usually meticulous, mature, intelligent, team players, and caring. Your application needs to reflect this.
This is No Lake Wobegon: When Medical School Means You’re No Longer Above Average
“Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.”
– Garrison Keillor, A Prairie Home Companion
While NPR’s Garrison Keillor entertains listeners with weekly monologues highlighting news from Lake Wobegon, his fictional home town, it is that closing line “and all the children are above average” that has taken hold in the popular culture. The Lake Wobegon Effect refers to that normal human tendency to overestimate one’s abilities.
The problem is that an average is just that, an average, meaning that while some are above, there are also those below. We all want to be above average. Who shoots for the mean and makes it into medical school? The truth is, if you made it into medical school – or even if you’re somewhere earlier along the path – you have almost certainly been “above average” academically and otherwise most of your life. You were on the honor roll from the time you started receiving grades. You graduated near or at the top of your high school class, many being valedictorians. You were in your college’s honor society and graduated some version of cum laude. You were accepted to medical school.
Average just isn’t in your vocabulary.
And then medical school happens. . .
Navigating Your Future: A Roadmap to Specialty Exploration
Congratulations! You’re in medical school. What you will soon realize is that your answer to “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is going to have to change. Simply saying “doctor” is no longer enough. You need to start to figure out what kind of doctor you want to be. And, although applying to residency may feel very far off, there are steps you can do starting in your first year to help you pick the specialty that best suits you.
Most of us have fairly limited exposure to different specialties as pre-meds; mine consisted primarily of shadowing cardiothoracic surgeons. Yet there is a huge diversity among medical specialties, some of which you may have never heard about. Physiatry, anyone? Others you know of can be quite different than what you had envisioned. A friend of mine recently shadowed an interventional radiologist and was surprised by the surgical nature of the specialty.
The Dual Path: What to consider when considering an MD-PhD
“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” – Yogi Berra
I was sitting in the back of a filled auditorium listening to a presentation about the medical school application process when I heard the question that would forever change my life’s trajectory. “What about MD-PhD programs?” a woman sitting somewhere down in front asked. That was the first time I had heard of the dual degree program. Having struggled to decide on my career path, this seemed like the best of all worlds: I could get an MD and a PhD.
Getting Into Medical School and Residency: Wish I Knew It Before I Blew It
Drawing on the wisdom of those who have gone before you can help you avoid career-hindering mistakes.
You're Not Alone: Mental Health Issues During Medical School
Confidential help is available for the upwards of 1 in 4 medical students who meet the criteria for depression.
9 Things to Do Before Applying to Medical School
Think about including these steps in your path to medical school:
1. Work or volunteer in the medical field. Working or volunteering in a health care-related environment or organization will not only enhance your medical school application, it will benefit you. It’s a chance to see if you enjoy working in the health or medical field, network with like-minded peers, take on increased responsibility and leadership roles, and build your resume.
Consider internships and research opportunities at health care facilities or research institutions in your local community. Shadowing a doctor or health professional is another good way to find out if a career in medicine is right for you. Research and leadership positions on campus are also a great way to build your application and test out this career path.
Get Medical Experience
Three Tips to be an All Star First Year Medical Student
1. You need to view the process of learning differently. One of the biggest challenges to starting medical school is the paradigm shift that must occur from your studies as an undergraduate student. Though many of you may not go directly to medical school from undergrad – the average age of matriculating medical students is around 24 – you may still be holding onto your study habits from your college days.
How to Not Get Into Medical School
As an undergraduate student, I wanted to know how to get into medical school, and I wanted it straight from the source: the medical students. I figured that because they got in, they must have it figured out.
Then I got accepted into medical school and realized the truth. While there are some real lessons to learn to be more successful, medical school admissions can be a pretty arbitrary process. It’s actually more of a crap shoot than you would like to think. I gave myself less than a 1% chance of getting in to my current school, yet here I am. My state school, where I considered myself very competitive (higher than average stats, etc) didn’t even put me on their waitlist. Why? No clue.
Six Things to Remember While Parenting in Medical School
Some advice to help you be both a professional student and the best parent you can be.