I'm Sahil. I'm the founder
of MedSchoolCoach and I'm also a clinical professor at
Harvard and an endovascular surgeon up at
Beth Israel Deaconess. I am here today to talk to you guys about everything
you need to know about being
pre-med. So who's a pre-med in here?
Alright, cool.
We've got the right room. All right. So you know there's there's so much stuff that you guys hear
and know about and learn about and read
about, I mean this this
organization seems awesome just in that
five minutes that I observed here, like
I was telling Skye. I was not in an organization
anywhere near as organized and on top of things
as you guys are. So already, nice job. What I want to talk to you
about is sort of everything you know about
being a pre-med and then I'm going to tell you some
stuff that you're pre-med
office might not tell you. So do you guys have a pre-med
office here that you go to , and how are they? Do you guys
find good advice from them
? Yeah. OK. So that's usually what I hear.
Right. It's like maybe, maybe not. Obviously, they're a great
resource that you should start
with. A lot of them are going to be
awesome. But you know there's stuff that
you may not always get. And so I'm going to try to give
you a little bit more insight into what an
admissions committee might be looking for, what I look
for when I review an application, and
I've reviewed thousands of
applications. I've interviewed hundreds of
students both for medical school and for fellowship and
for residency so I've done this for a long
time. And then of course helped a lot
of students actually through
the process. So I'm going to start with
this. So no medical slide or medical presentation is complete
without a picture of
Hypocrates, right ? Like you have to put him in
there to start. And one of his quotes
was: "Life is short.
The art is long." Right? And this could mean a
whole bunch of different
things. But the first part of my
presentation here I want to
devote to all of you guys who are
saying you want to be pre-med
s. And let's just think about the
journey it's going to take for you guys to
actually become doctors,
right. And it's going to take a long
time for all of you guys to
get to the point where you're
treating patients and it
should take you a long time. Right. None of you guys should go
treat patients tomorrow
because that's kind of scary. I don't want to be your patient
tomorrow. It's gonna take years and years
of training to get there. But you know it takes a long
time to acquire these skills and for effect the expertise,
and then before you know it the things
you think you know are obsolete. And so this is one thing I tell all my
pre-meds which is stay humble.
Right. And you really ,all of us in
medicine, we we don't know Jack, you
know. If you think back in the day, and
this was not that long ago, we were doing things
like that right (pointing). Cutting people open, and we
still do actually very similar
things. Today , I practice medicine and I do
endovascular procedures, so I get super cool pictures
and I can do really fun essentially minimally invasive procedures,
things that used to require people being cut open, I can
do through catheters and small tiny incision in the
wrist or the groin basically see inside people
and be able to cure their
disease. And that seems really cool to
me right now.
Right. But the reality is when all of you guys become doctors you're
going to look back at what I did and say "Why did
he do that. That
was really weird. We have immunotherapy now. We have this cell that we can
just program to kill cancer. We got to go cut it out. We have to go irradiate it." And that's sort of the ever
evolving process of medicine.
Right. You guys are all gonna be a
part of this as you go through it and that's part
of the most, I think that's
the best thing for all of you guys
who are young and going into this is that this is
going to evolve so much in your lifetime in my
lifetime. I'm about 15 years ahead of you
guys in my practice , so by the time that I'm old
you guys are gonna be kind of in the middle of your
practice and you're going to I promise you we're going to
look back at things that we do today and we say why did
we do that? That's crazy. Just like I look back at things
that people did 20, 30 years ago and said "that
was crazy what were those doctors thinking?"
That's not the way you should
treat this today. So that's my little interlude
on sort of, you know, where you guys are gonna go
. So now I'm going to take you
through the process, right. Now most of you guys know the
vast majority of this, but let's let's go
through it right. So you started college, great. You guys chose UT. It's beautiful here. The campus is really cool. I really like that building in
the George Washington statue. We took some pictures and
selfies out there earlier. Really nice. Now four years of college,
right. And then a lot of you guys
probably you're gonna be going through maybe a year or two of
post bacc, maybe a gap year or
two. How many people are actually
applying to medical school
right now? Have submitted the
application? One. How many people are seniors? OK so you seniors know that you
know obviously you guys are gonna be taking
gap years, right. You guys are gonna be doing
something else in that year
and maybe it's a post bacc. Maybe it's an SMP. The average matriculate age to
medical school, does anybody
know what it is? Yes.
Twenty six.
Right. That means the average person
who's starting med school has taken three or four years
off between college and med school, right. So plenty of people taking a
long time off. Why? You've got to improve your
application. You got to do your
extracurriculars.
Your grades stink. Your MCAT sucks. You didn't shadow enough. You gotta do all this stuff, right. You're getting to the point
where you're making yourself a
more competitive applicant. Then of course you have med
school, for years, and you say yeah I'm in med school, but it
doesn't stop there, right. Then you got an internship for
a year. You have residency for anywhere
from one to six years. Then you have a fellowship which can
be another three to four
years. And then finally you become an
attending after all that time, so that's about 12 years
away from where most of your guys
sit right now, which is a long time, right. Before you ever practice medicine in the sense of have
a patient's life in your own hands and your hands
only it's going to take you about twelve years
, which again is not a bad
thing, right. I don't want any of you guys
treating me today, but maybe
twelve years from now I will. So. You guys know that medicine and
being a pre-med is a great weed out, right. For every 10 people who start college as a pre-med
, about six of them end up finishing
the pre-reqs and getting to
the MCAT. Right. And what's in between there?
Things like orgo, right. That's when people drop out and
they say "Screw this, I'm out," right. They go somewhere else. Once you finish the MCAT,
right, or you take the MCAT then you
actually you know, some people look at the
MCAT they have PTSD and decide not to take it because they
took the S.A.T. so many times. You guys have probably never
filled out a bubble sheet.
Right. Have any of you guys filled out
this bubble sheet? OK.
Yeah. OK. Fair enough.
All right. So we haven't evolved as
quickly as I thought we did. So for every six people. So we have ten, about six of
them take the MCAT, and then about four of them get to
the point where they actually
submit an application And of those four people, how
many actually get into med school? Yeah one or two
, Right. So for all of you guys who said
you're pre-meds, look around because for every
10 of you probably one or two of you
guys will make it. It's a humbling thought, right. But the reality is that you can make it if you plan
ahead. So last year there were about ninety six thousand or so
applicants to M.D. schools in the United States
and about 40,000 matriculants,
right. So about what about 40 percent of people actually got in. And remember, that's only the
40 percent that ended up passing orgo and getting to
the point where they could
actually apply. Right. So what do you guys need. You guys have all taken bio, or
you will take bio, you've all taken high school bio and you
guys know you have the brain, heart, lungs, liver, right.
So the brain.
You gotta be smart. You've got to get through this.
You've gotta get good grades. That's obvious, right. I say heart because you have to
have a desire to actually do
this. This is a long pathway, and that's
why you also need your lungs. You're gonna get winded
throughout this pathway.
It's long. You've got to make sure that
you're taking deep breaths
along the way. And then the liver, right. What does a liver do? Filters out toxins, right.
And guess what. There are plenty of toxins
along the way right. Not only that social night
where you're bingeing and
drinking but there's other things too
that are gonna be going on in
your life. You're gonna hit road bumps
along the way you're gonna get
a bad grade your MCAT score is not gonna
come out as good as you wanted
it to. These things are going to
happen and you just have to
kind of get over them and move on. A question that I I want
everybody to ask themselves who says they're pre-med in
here is is this really for you
, right. Have you shadowed doctors? You
guys are in this club
obviously. Some of you will go to
international trips which is an awesome start to see
what physicians do. But keep in mind that the way
physicians practice in Guatemala or Ecuador is not
the way physicians practice in the States, but at least
the concept of taking care of a patient is
there. Are you doing this because you
really want to make money
? Probably not a good idea. You can make money as a doctor,
but you probably can make a
whole lot more money going into finance or
any number of things. Are your parents doctors?
Terrible idea if you're going into medicine
because your parents are
doctors, right. A good starting point to think
about medicine but not why you should go into it. Have you explored other
careers? By show of hands for
those you guys who said you're pre-med, when did you decide your pre-meds?
When you were a baby? When you were five? When you
were in high school? When you
started college? when did you guys
decide? I mean most you guys probably
have thought about this at
least since you were in high school. I would assume right. I got a four year old kid at
home and I got him a doctor set and he says I want to be a
doctor. So there are some people who
start pretty young, but that's not a good reason. You should explore other
careers. You should make sure that that
you've seen other things because mostly
you guys who said I want to go into medicine
have probably thought about
that since high school and I want you
just to explore, right. I want you to make sure that
this is really for you because
as I said like on the first slide
it's very long, right. Now medicine is also really
diverse.
Right. When you say you want to be a
doctor that actually doesn't mean a whole lot to somebody
who's actually practicing because what I do on an
everyday basis is very different than what
Doctor X does, is very
different than what Doctor Y does.
Right. I do minimally invasive
procedures. I stick long needles in people. My patients are asleep. I talk to, or see them in
clinic once a week. There is somebody else who sees
patients in clinic 40 patients a clinic a day every
single day in an outpatient
setting. My patients are dying on the
table. Other physicians have patients
who want prettier legs.
Right. So there's always a huge
variety of what physicians actually
do. You guys have all watched House
probably, right ? You all know that that's not
real. That guy does everything that
every physician does. That's not actually when
anybody really does in life.
Right. We only do one one-hundredth of
each of those things. But it gives you an idea that
the medicine is so diverse that as
you guys are going through this and shadowing people you
should really think about what that
person is doing and if that's what you want to
end up doing, right. So if you're shadowing a
cardiologist in an outpatient setting that's very different
than shadowing a surgeon in an inpatient
setting. It's very different than shadowing a
radiologist or a pathologist
or a pediatrician. And each of these things is
just their everyday life is so very
different that if you don't like one of
them that doesn't mean you
don't like medicine or if you really love one of
them that doesn't mean you
love everything about medicine,
right. There's a lot of other
variation within their. Have you guys, I don't know how
many you guys might be
familiar this. Has anybody ever seen the
U.P.S. driver versus a doctor slide ? Ok so a couple of you guys
have.
Right. So let me let me take you
through this right. I said in the beginning that
you don't want to go into
medicine because you want to make
money. So the person from your high
school who became a U.P.S. driver, not
that there is anything wrong with that,
but the person who decided that that's what they're going
to do is going to make more money than you for the first
16 to 18 years post-high school,
right. That's a long time. And so you've got to be willing
to kind of go through this. Now the Green Line says a
U.P.S.
driver a working M.D. like ours, which is you know
sixty to eight hours a week, how much money can they make
? And they can obviously make a whole lot more if
they're doing that. So what's the reality, right? Eighty five percent of you're
going to come out with some
kind of debt. Your debt's going to be in the
two hundred thousand dollar
range. Now you guys are at state
school. That's probably a very smart
idea because hopefully you're
saving some money there. But even with that if you go to
medical school, public or private, you're
going to come out with that
from there, too. Average debt for medical school
graduates around three hundred thousand dollars these
days. That's a lot of money, right. It's a lot. So, if that hasn't scared you away and you say you know what
I am all about debt. I don't care, like, ring up the
credit card.
It's my parent's money. We're all good, right. And then let's keep going.
Right. So what's it going to actually
take to get you to get there. So we're going to get into some
specifics. You know a lot of you right now
look like this.
Right. You're like, Holy Oh, this is a lot longer than I
thought. It's going to cost a lot of
money. But that's OK, because with the
right planning you can get
there. Right. So I've laid out a few steps
that I think it takes.
Right. So this present day you,
looking good. You've got to get good
grades. Gotta get a good MCAT score. All the extracurriculars that
you guys have heard about. I put in something extra there.
Right. Because just having
extracurriculars is not
enough. Just checking off the boxes is
not enough for med school.
I want to see a story. I want to see a theme. I want to see who you are as a
person. So you got to do something
extra. And then if you get through all
that then you actually have to
write your application. Then you have to sit down for
interviews and you have to
write your personal statement and secondaries and all that
kind of stuff.
Right. So it's a long process. And we're going to go through
all the steps of these. Hass anybody seen this chart
before? OK so a few of you
have. So this is the AAMC Table 23, OK. This chart lays out what an applicant with an MCAT score on the top and a GPA
along the side. How many of those applicants
apply and how many of them end up getting into school? Right. And so let's take a pretty good
GPA. Right. Let's take a pretty good GPA of
3.6
to 3.8 .
Not bad. Most you guys would be happy
with that. You
should be proud of that. That's not bad. Right
. And let's take a let's take the average MCAT score which is
around a 500. Last year sorry. This is like two years worth of
data.
No, sorry. One year worth of data. There were 2,000, no about 3,000
applicants with those numbers and about
700 got in, right, for 25 percent
acceptance rate. It's pretty low, right. Even with pretty good grades
and an average MCAT score only 25 percent of those
students will get in. Right. Obviously as you go up more
, the more people go in. So your goal is to be in this
corner, right. Everybody is gonna get a 517 on the
MCAT here. Alright. and everybody is going to have
a 4.0
GPA, right. But even those who have a 517
and a 4.0, only 88 percent of those people
got in, right. That's where some of the extra
stuff comes in. It's also where the interviews
come in. I've interviewed plenty of
people who have 520s and 4.0's and I put a giant reject stamp
on them because I would never want to
teach them. I would never want them in my
class. I would never want them taking
care of a patient. So this is a good slide or a good sort of reference
point to have so you can understand, hey, if I have a
certain GPA what MCAT score do I really need to kind of be
competitive and vice versa. So let's look at the average
numbers to first a sec, right. So the average numbers are
this, right. The average matriculate, so that's
the person who actually starts
medical school, had a 3.7 total GPA last year. The average MCAT score was a
510, about 10 points above above
the mean. So pretty, pretty damn steep
competition when it comes to
it. Right. But some of you guys will make
it through, which is awesome
. You just have to plan and prepare
and make sure that you're
thinking along these lines early. That's where, you know, for
those who don't, that's when they don't get it.
Alright. Let's talk about
extracurriculars for a second,
right. You guys are all doing great
extracurriculars. This is obviously a great club. You've heard of the pillars. I call these the pillars of med
school activities, right. Everybody needs to shadow. Everybody needs to have
volunteer experience. Everybody should have some kind
of leadership experience on
their application. Research, and then clinical
work.
Right. And I'm going to go through
each of these categories and
kind of tell you on average what people have. So volunteering. Right now volunteering takes on
a whole set of definitions. But the bottom line is, you know,
you give back in some way. Does this club count as
volunteering? Well, if you go
on the trips, sure. But maybe you want to count this
club as your clinical
experience, right. So you have to think along
those lines. OK what am I going to count as
my volunteering? What
am I going to count as my clinical experience when it
comes to putting together my
application ? So the average the average
accepted person has about one hundred
hours in four years. Right. As you guys are going through
each and every one of your activities
, anything that you do, what you should do is maintain
a simple Google Sheet. And just remember what you did
and how many hours you did it for and it doesn't mean
that you're going to put it on
your application four years from now or three
years from now or two years
from now, but it means that you can
reference back during that
time. Because I work with so many
applicants who say you know I
don't remember what I did, or I shadowed that
person but only remember what specialty he is in. If you go shadow somebody,
write down what specialty,
write down, like, a patient that you
saw that day that stood out to
you. Just write that down. Keep a running document,
because it's gonna be so
helpful for you later on. So here's a volunteer,
right. Applicant volunteer for multiple years. Attended a mission trip in
Mexico. Assisted in building homes. Tutoring and mentoring orphans.
Right. That sounds like every single
one of you guys, here.
Right. Replace Mexico with any number
of the places you go. So that's great. Definitely something to put on
your application. But how do you get that
something extra.
Right. How do you make that stand out
. Well here's how I think this person
could make it stand out. He started the chapter actually at his school, right. He also organized the fundraiser
himself to get goods donated
there. And by the way, he also decided
that he wanted to learn
Spanish because he wants to better
communicate with the people
when he went down to Mexico. Right. That's taking the extra step in
that extracurricular which really makes a big
difference because I can't
tell you how many people I see who say
"well I went on a two week
trip." OK. That's phenomenal. What else did you do? Why did
you do it? How does that play into the rest of your
application right? How do you
develop a theme around it. Shadowing. Do you guys have opportunities
to shadow ? Have you guys been able to
get into, I mean this hospital is obviously around here,
how many people have been able
to shadow somebody so far? Good.
Perfect. So it sounds like you guys, you
know, there's places that have
limited opportunities, sounds like you
guys may have good
opportunities, which is great. I want each of you guys who are
going to apply to school to have shadowed at least
three physicians in three different specialties
. Alright
. That's what I look for in
application. It has to be specialties that are
diverse, so I don't want you
just to do outpatient pedes,
because as I said earlier, outpatient pedes is
very different than inpatient ICU work, and I want
you to get a broad exposure to
it. You also want to make sure that you, as I was just
saying, I kind of, think about a
patient that you saw or something, an interaction that
you saw with that doctor that stood out to
you, because you may use that as the basis of your
personal statement or your
secondaries or something else later
on down the line. And I can promise you, if you're
applying four years from now,
you're not going to remember that
interaction if you don't write
it down. Write it down.
Think about it. Just think, OK, what was the
one thing I took from this
person? Now it's less important to do
thousands of hours of
shadowing, right. Some people think that their
application just needs to have shadow, shadow, shadow,
shadow, shadow. And the reality is that doesn't
really separate you in any
way. What's more important is the
quality of the work ,as well as the clinical work,
which I'll talk about next. So there is a difference
between shadowing and clinical
work. Right. Clinical work is you getting
your hands dirty. Shadowing is you being a fly on
the wall, just watching
somebody. Right. I heard that you guys were
doing a little course on blood
pressure or vital signs, like, when you
go and take those vital signs at a clinic
or go abroad and do that, that's clinical
work, right. When you go work at a hospice
and actually talk to a
patient, when you work at a nursing
home and maybe you take the
vitals, or a free clinic and and take
the H&P, the history and physical, those
are actual clinical
opportunities. Maybe you go scribe and you're
part of the team. These are things that we want
to see. I would say 10 years ago, we
didn't really care about this stuff and this
wasn't really all that
important. But now it's actually super
important and every single successful applicant
has some clinical work on their actual
application. And so you guys should
definitely be thinking about
getting those and I put up 50 to 100 hours
as sort of the average that people tend to
have of clinical work. Research. How many of you guys are in a
research lab or have done some
research work? Good. So, I mean you UT obviously,
you guys have a great
foundation to get involved in a lot of
this stuff and you should
absolutely take it. I'm sure some of you guys have
asked the question, should I
do basic science research? Should I do clinical
researc? The answer is it really doesn't matter which
you do. What matters is sort of how far
you go with it. And you know I put this on
there as, you know, one of the
admissions committees I sat
on, we sort of use this as a benchmark, right
. We kind of classified applicants
in a couple of different ways. Well, at minimum they had to have done some sort of
research where they tested a hypothesis, right. If it was in a class, OK. It would be better if it is in
a lab. Right. The better one is somebody
who's gone through sustained research two plus years in the
lab, contributed to publications,
will have to be a first
author. Right. It's hard to get first author
publications as you guys have
probably found out, but maybe you least present your work at the, you know, UT Austin Science Symposium Day. Right
.
That's important. Get out there and present your
work. It could be at a national
level. It could be at a regional
level. Talk to your P.I. and say "hey, you know I've
been doing this. I'd really love to put it
abstract in. Put a poster in. Talk
about this." Because that stuff is gonna
make you a step above. Obviously if you have actual publications, awesome, like
that's great. But honestly, if you have like
publications where you're the
sixth or seventh author, not super
impressive. You really need to be a first
or second author for me to
actually be impressed by that at the
end of the day.
Alright. So we talked a little bit of
extracurriculars right. And now we get to the MCAT. How many of you guys have taken
the MCAT so far? OK. A bunch of you taking it. Who's in the midst of studying
for it? Who's going to take it
in January or so? All right. So we got a bunch of people who
are coming up on it. Right. And so you're starting to get
nervous about this test and rightfully so. Like, this test sucks in a
bunch of ways because it kind of
determines your future. It's the test that honestly is
probably 50 percent, if not more, of what most schools look at. And every school will give you
a whole bunch of hoopla that says we look at
applicants holistically and we really want the best
applicants.
Yeah. Bullshit. Like we want people with good
MCAT scores as a starting
point. OK. You really need to have a
decent MCAT score to get yourself in the door.
Right. I call it an includer not an ex
cluder. Sorry, I call it an excluder not
an includer, which is to say
that just because you have an MCAT score
does not mean you're into that class. But if you don't have a certain
MCAT score it means you're probably going to be
left out. Your application's not even going to
be looked at in reality. A school like George Washington
gets 15,000 applicants every single year. There is no way that somebody
is sitting through 15,000
applicants. I promise you there is a
computer filter that sorts by MCAT score and
cuts off a whole bunch of people that
don't meet it. Now that's different for
everybody right. So if you're an
underrepresented minority
maybe the MCAT score is lower. If you're in-state versus
out-of-state maybe the MCAT
score is lower for that particular category
. But the reality is the MCAT score
does play a really important role in the
entire process.
Right. And you guys probably know the
MCAT changed a few years ago they called it MCAT
2015. Not very creative, but the the reality is that instead of
being scored from 1 to 45 they now score from 472 to 528 ,which if you subtract
is the same as 1 to 45, but they
changed the scoring scale for
whatever reason. Four sections. You guys know the four sections
. What do you want to be aiming for
? Well we look back. Remember the average
applicants, sorry, the average
matriculant had around a 507. I would say that you want to
really be, it obviously
depends on what your goals are, right
. Are you interested in osteopathic
schools? Awesome. Are you interested in just MD
schools? Are you interested in
just Top 20 schools? Well, obviously
all your goals are different along those pathways. But the bottom line is, score
as high as you can. And then when you get that MCAT
score on the day, this is what it looks like, and you're
either gonna be
screaming in joy, or you're gonna be crying in
the library because you're
back studying again. Right . Those are really the two
options that people have after
they get their MCAT score. This is what it looks like. You get the score basically on
each and every section that
gives you a percentile. You know there's CARS which is
typically, a lot of times, the hardest
section for people. Those scores tend to be lower
sometimes, the science scores
tend to be higher. We do take into account the
weighting of these things, which is to say that if one
score is way low and another scores way high,
that does make some impact in the way that I review an
application. It doesn't mean that all your
scores have to be exactly the
same. Obviously some people are
stronger in some places than
others, but it does mean that you want
to be aiming for some kind of
consistency. And then if you potentially
retake the MCAT, which is
totally OK to do by the way. A lot of people retake the MCAT. Twice is totally fine. You want to sort of be aiming
to get your scores that were lower a little bit higher
and maybe maintain those other
scores. I once worked with an applicant
who took the MCAT eleven
times. That was insanity. Don't take it 11 times. But, twice, even three times is
OK. In terms of dealing with the
MCAT, the very, very, very, very best preparation
for the MCAT is the courses that you guys
are sitting in during your actual classes, right. So doing well in orgo, doing well
in biochem, doing well in bio, that's going to
be the best preparation by far, because if you do all
of those courses, then when you actually go study for
the MCAT, now it's the second
time you're seeing the material. And then when you actually go
review it now it's the third
time you're seeing material. Right. So bar none, the best thing to
do is do well in those
classes. And then how do you how do you
go beyond that, right. Or how much time do you
should you take off before you
take it? I usually recommend that if you
can take the time off ,that you
take six weeks of dedicated
study time. Remember this is a really
important test. If you can't carve out six
weeks for a test that's going to get you
into med school, like, you've
got to reprioritize. Right. We got to figure out what to
do. Maybe it's take another gap
year or whatever it might be. But taking six weeks of time is
definitely at minimum what I would do. Now obviously there's going to
times we can't do that so if
you're studying while in class, which
a lot of you guys are going to
be doing, then start thinking
about the MCAT at least three
months prior. And that doesn't mean you study
30 hours a day. It means you at least think about
it a couple hours a week as you get closer and
closer you ramp up your studying during that time.
Right. Khan Academy. How many of you guys use Khan
Academy? It's awesome. It's really good resource,
right. We're actually, we made a
resource that's going to be
available in the next couple of months
, that's actually...Khan Academy is dedicated to all
topics, right. We're just dedicating it to the
MCAT. And so look out for that
because it's it's gonna be
free. It's gonna be a video course
that you guys can watch, and
it's gonna be Khan Academy on
steroids for the
MCAT, essentially. AAMC questions, for those you guys who haven't
taken the test or are
practicing, AAMC questions are crucial. You should buy the AAMC
questions. They're really the best
practice material out there. Every company, Princeton
Review, Kaplan, Next Step, all have practice
material, we have practice
material, but the reality is AAMC should
be your starting and ending point
for most practice material because it's really, it's you
know, their the people write
the test. They have the best practice
material. And then as you guys are going through the study process,
right, you're going to be seeing a
lot of courses and some of
them work and some of them don't work. I can't tell you how many
students we have we take a
Kaplan or Princeton Review or Berkeley class and
they're sitting in an audience like this and
they're totally zoned out,
right. They're sleeping. They're not paying attention.
They're on their phone. They're studying in the back.
That's what I did. I took a Kaplan course, I went
to class, and I sat in the back of the
room studying on my own. It was the biggest waste of two
thousand dollars I could ever
imagine. And that's what a lot of people
end up doing because the
teacher's going a sort of different pace that they
might not be good, et cetera,
et cetera. So make sure that kind of learning
style if you're going to sign up for
that works for you. If not, think of a different
kind of learning style for
yourself. I just want to highlight a
couple of free resources that we have for the
MCAT which you guys, for those you guys
are studying now and are going
to be studying later, like, just log
on to YouTube. We have these videos that are
good to listen to. We also have an MCAT Basics
podcast which is really
awesome. So if you're walking to class
, if you're at the gym, this is what you want to be
listening to because it will be like osmosis. It really will be over time. You know, when I study for the
boards, and the boards are what you take
after you go through medical school or
during medical school, I literally listen to these
bootleg copies of this guy who gave a lecture
and those bootleg copies are essentially like
infiltrated all across all medical schools across the
country and everybody listens to them, but they were gold
because you would be at the gym, you would be doing
whatever, and you'd just be
listening to it, and then you would remember
it. You just listen to it over and over
and over again. So for those you guys who are sort
of audio listeners you definitely
want to check out the MCAT
Basics podcast. We basically go through a topic
every single week and you'll you'll get better,
and you'll get better and
better at it as you go. So that's MCAT okay.
Right. Now what about the actual
application. So we have one person in the
audience who I think is going through the application
process, but a bunch of you
will be. Here's the general timeline,
right. Somewhere between January and
April before you apply, you want to be asking for
letters of recommendation. You want to be getting your
personal statement ready. You want to be studying for the
MCAT and potentially taking it
if you haven't taken it already. Then in May and June, the applications open up.
Right. And a lot of you guys may be
applying to three different
applications, right. There's a Texas application
which is the TMDSAS.
Guess what. You guys have two extra essays
compared to everybody else. Yay. There's the MCAS application which goes to the rest of the
MD schools around the country. And then there's the AACOMAS
which is the osteopathic
application. So you guys may be filling out
three applications which are all relatively
similar to each other, so it's
not the end of the world, but that's
the amount of work that you
might be putting in. And then once you actually
submit that application, you get secondary
applications. What are secondary applications
? They're a moneymaker for
medical schools because you've got to
pay another hundred fifty
bucks for every single school you
apply to to submit a secondary application, but unfortunately
they won't look at your
application until you submit it. So those secondary applications
consist of even more essays
. You're gonna be writing essays up the
wazoo. You're gonna be so sick of
essays by the end of this whole thing that you're going
to never want to write again, but you're gonna have to for
residency and fellowship, but
different story. You 're gonna write these secondary
applications. They're gonna be more essays. And then finally you get to the
interview stage where you actually sit down. There's two different types of
interviews you guys may have
heard of. The regular interview and the
MMI interview. How many of you guys have heard
of the MMI interview? A few
of. So it's called a multiple mini
interview. It's basically interviews where you go in simulated
sessions. So you go and you sit down next
to an actor and you basically simulate
either a patient encounter or an
awkward situation or something along those
lines. So it might be something like,"
you read the prompt which says walk into this room, the
person in the room is a co-worker who you've never met, but you're
driving to the airport." And that's the prompt. And so you got to walk into the
room, and you gotta stand next to that awkward
guy, and you got to start acting like
you're a co-worker of his driving him to the airport. And so what are we evaluating
there, right. We're evaluating your skills of
communication. We're evaluating your ability
to think critically. We're evaluating your ability
to sort of interact with people at all
thing, by the way, which are
tremendously important for
when you interact with patients. And that's why the MMI
interview has taken off and a lot of schools are using
it. If all goes well, you get an
acceptance, right, and that you start med
school in August of the
following year. So look at that process right. It takes at least 16 months or so between when you
say OK I'm going to start applying to medical school to
actually get in. So more length in the process. Why do you need to be proactive
in this situation? Right. You need to be proactive in
this situation because there's a lot of steps, right. I just put up five up there. The pre-med curriculum.
The MCAT. Your extracurriculars. The actual application. And then once you actually
submit your application
navigating the interview process and everything else. So there's there's just a lot
of steps in this whole thing. For those you guys who are a
young, freshman, sophomores, juniors, even people who are
seniors and not applying yet, as long as you've planned
ahead, you can tackle all this. It's those people who don't plan
ahead who wait to the last
minute that really can't tackle it
and that's when that's when bad situations happen. So. That's that's a little bit of
info. Now, I know I just gave you a
lot of info, right. And a lot of a lot of people
ask me when I give this "Hey can I get copies of these
slides," et cetera, et cetera. So what we've done is actually
put this all together in a
book for you. And so if you guys want to take
a second and just text that if you guys want to use
our cell phones they're cool.
(Text 'UTA' to 833-201-7007 to receive the free Guide to Becoming a Physician guidebook.) OK. I heard the no cell phone and
no laptop rule which was
actually really cool. But if you text that if you
text that number you should get a link back from us
that will allow you to
download this book and that book is
basically a great little resource to look at. It goes through everything I
just talked about in more
detail as well. It's got a section on the
personal statement, the
interview, so no matter where you are,
hopefully it'll help you figure out what med school
admissions committees are
looking for. It'll really give you some idea of
the number of hours you need for those of you who
are younger in the process, et
cetera. So take a second and do that
and hopefully you can let me know
if it works you should get a little text back that says
with a link.
OK. Cool. Each of you guys is going to
take a different pathway to
this, right. Every single person's pathways
can be different and that's
actually good because no medical school
applicant should be the same as the next medical
school applicant, and no medical school is looking
for the same thing. Right
. So I always get the question
well what is Dell Medical
School looking for? Right. Or what is Harvard looking for? And the reality is every med
school is looking for a spectrum of people. If I pick all of the same exact
people at my medical school, that
would be terrible. That would make for a really
boring 150 person class,
right. While looking for a spectrum of
people, and everything I mentioned so far is sort of
the what I would say is the
foundations of making a good
applicant. What you have to decide, as you guys
are going through this, is what's my theme? Right. Who am I? How am I gonna be
different ? Why should a medical school
accept me? I want you to think about that. Think about that question: Why
should a medical school accept me? And if your answer is,
well it's because I shadowed three people, not
good, because the person next to you shadowed three
people as well. Think about how you're going to
separate yourself as you go
along and shape your
extracurriculars along those
ways. Shape your, essentially your
story, along that way. And if you do that, that's how
you're gonna make a successful
applicant. That's how you're going to make
yourself in that 50 percent of people
with a certain MCAT and certain GPA that
actually get in versus those that don't.
Right. Alright. So quickly, what we do at
MedSchoolCoach is we help with all these
things right. So we help with MCAT.
We have an MCAT course. We have MCAT tutoring. We have, basically physician
advisors who can help you
through the process. We act as, we basically we have about 75
physicians on staff all of whom have served on admissions
committees to act as your guidance counselors or
your pre-health counselors for
those of you who don't have good ones. If you have good ones, go for
it. That's an awesome start. But we added essays. We help you to schools. We help you plan your path. We help you figure out what it
is that you're going to do when it's actually time for
interview prep. We sit down and mock interview
with you. For those you guys you're
studying for the MCAT, we go
through the MCAT as well as tutoring for
that and it's really, really
effective when you can sit
down one-on-one with somebody as opposed to
you know in a big, I would
say. So that's that. That's what I got for you. Hopefully that gives you some
basis. Now there's typically a bunch
of questions after this that are very individualized and
that's totally fine. I'm happy to stay and answer
some questions. Happy to answer some group
questions as well. But hopefully it gives you a
little bit of the overview of
the process. I know some of it's scary,
right. Particularly when there's, when
I said raise your hands and there's ten of you and
only one of you or two of you
will make it through , but the reality is that if
you really plan well, if you do well in
class, then more of you can make it
through. Like coming to lectures like
this. By getting help. By being part of organizations. That's how you're going to
actually make yourself a
successful applicant at the end of the
day. So don't get too scared if this
is what you want to do, you can get there, even if you
fail a bunch of classes , you can get there.
It's can take a couple of
years. You gonna to do post bacc
program and a special masters
program and a whole bunch of other stuff
. But if being a doctor is really
what you want to do, you can eventually get there OK. And it's worth it at the end of
the day because it's cool
right. I love what I do. I love what I do on an everyday
basis. I take care of patients who are
literally dying in front of me and could die
on my table and we save them and I put a
Band-Aid on their neck at the
end of it. And I think that's pretty cool.
And they're good. And other people love what they
do. They love talking to their
patients and watching families grow and being a
pediatrician and watching a kid go from
literally a baby all the way to 18. Like
how cool is that. You've seen their entire
spectrum and you've been their
doctor their entire time So there's so many cool things
you could do in medicine. It's really an awesome field
for those of you guys who are going to go into it, and
it's it's an honor to be in
this. Right. Because you're going to have
the lives of other people in
your hands. So as you're going through and
studying for orgo and thinking about isomers or
whatever it is that you think about in orgo (I literally haven't thought
about orgo in 15-20 years), whatever you think
about, think about at the end of the
day, the light at that end of
that tunnel. It's a long tunnel. But there is light at the end
of it. And it's worth it for those you
guys who are going to make it.
Alright. So thank you again for
having me.
I appreciate it.
