For those who’ve always aspired to become a doctor, the time they fill out and lodge their med school applications could be the most exciting, fulfilling, and exhilarating day of their lives. It’s that time when they already finished pre-med studies, and are about to head to that place they’ve always dreamed of—the med school, where they’ll train to become a doctor.
Applying for med school after completing your pre-med studies involves several requirements and stages. Some people get some experience in a medical, allied, or healthcare-related job before they go to med school. You also need to prepare for the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT). You can read this post to know more details of how to get into med school.
How To Go About Your Med School Application
Below are four tips that you might find enlightening and useful for your plans of getting into med school. Before the application season, you can do some advanced planning and preparation to get into the med school you’ve set your heart into.
- Study For The MCAT
Study and review for the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT). This is the first thing you need to nail in order to get into your med school of choice. If you didn’t do very well in pre-med with your hard science course work, it’s not too late as you can still make up for it by getting high marks in the MCAT. If you did an excellent job in your pre-med, then you still need to get a decent score in the MCAT to get into your dreammed school.
To ensure success, you need to study and review the subjects that are part of the MCAT. You have to go back and study mathematics, quantitative reasoning, biology, chemistry, botany, biochemistry, and physics, if you want to get high scores. The MCAT is loaded with questions from these subject areas. Take simulation tests so you can time your performance.
Note that MCAT scores range from 472-528. Accepted medical students score an average of around 508.
You should allot between 300-350 hours of study for the MCAT.
- Get Some Medical Experience
Take a job where you’d be able to get work experience in a role where you’ll have an arm’s length view of how patients are diagnosed and treated. Don’t worry about your lack of experience in actual treatment of patients. Med school admissions committees don’t expect you to have real experience in actually treating patients as you’re not a doctor yet.
But, what they would want to see is whether you already had some glimpse of what you’d be doing should they admit you to their school. With the rising need for doctors, more schools are becoming more conscious of their role in preparing would-be doctors and surgeons.
Med school admissions committees aren’t unaware that a lot of aspiring doctors and surgeons have childhood ideals and, perhaps, romanticized notions of the life of a doctor. But, they would want med students to enter med school with realistic expectations of what a doctor does on a daily basis.
- Volunteer To Help Sick Family Or Friends
Another way of creating a positive impression with your application and during your interview is by doing volunteer work to help the sick. You can opt to help your family members or friends who are sick if you don’t have time to do full-time volunteer work.
A core part of being a doctor is the passion to helpother people, and med school admissions committees are certainly looking for that quality among the thousands of applicants each year.
This is also a way for you to gauge and reflect on your own experiences, feelings, responses, and attitude when you’re in a situation where you’d have to do unpaid work for a weak or sickly person, who, in all likelihood, won’t be able to repay your kindness. When you become a doctor, you’ll be dealing with a lot of pain, despair, hopelessness, and suffering.
- Tell Your Story
Most medschools will require you to write a personal statement or essay in response to the question on why you want to become a doctor.
It would help you a lotif you read some of the best personal statements written by students who were eventually admitted to their med schools of choice. When you read these selected statements, you’ll understand why they’re considered best among their peers.
They all start with hooking their audience with a riveting opening, then they’d tell their story of how they helped others endure pain and suffering. They’d end their piece with a compelling conclusion on why their personal story is a powerful narrativethat should be given a chance to enter med school.
Most of those whose personal statements were selected as best received multiple offers from the most prestigious med schools. Some were even offered full scholarships.
It’s No Walk In The Park
Learning to become a doctor entails many years of hard work, long nights of studying, hours spent in the laboratory, and sleepless nights for weeks on end attending to patients. It requires a lot of work and perseverance. It’s not a surprise, indeed, that med school admissions committees look for these traits among their applicants: strong work ethic,determination, aptitude in problem-solving, as well as compassion for the sick.
