HOW I GOT INTO HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL! Stats, extracurriculars, timeline, advice, etc.

what's up youtube peeps this is a video talking about my medical school application cycle i'll talk about where i applied where i got in what my stats and everything were i'll try to give you everything that i got and also what my essays were like and then some other thoughts and advice this is a whole i want to preface this by saying the reason why i chose to make a video like this was to provide information for folks who are currently like i was when i was entering the pre-med kind of cycle i was interested in content that you know where folks would share uh what their application was like where they got in that kind of thing it was very helpful for me to gauge for example what kind of medical schools i should be applying to in the first place how competitive i was that sort of thing and just to get a sense of of what applicants were like and and that sort of thing so let's jump right in first where did i apply uh where did i get in where did i get interviews that kind of thing so i applied to 16 schools originally in the primary applications i'm not sure if i'll be clever enough to put little animation text on but you know apologize apologies if not here we go from the top ordered by preference i had a whole spreadsheet which i recommend i applied to let's see harvard ucsf johns hopkins penn columbia yale stanford duke nyu pitt university of washington ucla michigan washu and st louis mayo clinic university of chicago and icon school of medicine in mount sinai great programs and especially i was focused on psychiatry research and leadership those were my kind of main three things and so i focused on medical schools that i knew had really strong programs in psychiatry in research and in leadership and kind of interpersonal work that sort of thing i'm particularly focused in general on sort of community type work i think going forward and so these programs also were strong in those fields that's why i chose them so moving on to where i did my secondary application i did a secondary and everywhere except for uh university of chicago sorry university of chicago not that i know maybe they wouldn't have wanted me anyway but i had already received an acceptance by then uh and so i didn't end up doing my secondary my cycle was very much dragged on i'll talk about the timeline in a little bit okay so what about interviews i ended up getting rejected pre-interview from ucsf duke ucla and michigan so i ended up with interviews to all the others which was very exciting onto acceptances i ended up getting acceptances to harvard to penn yale pitt and washu school of medicine so very very exciting in terms of wait lists i ended up getting wait listed at a hopkins stanford nyu mayo clinic and icon in mount sinai and the other ones were rejections so and in terms of where i'm ended up i'll probably be headed to harvard medical school in the fall which is incredibly exciting a huge dream school and something i'm thrilled you know an incredible opportunity in terms of stats and whatnot and the rest of my the kind of meat of my application stats wise my gpa overall is whenever i applied was a 3.94 again at unc chapel hill i'm not sure about science versus non-science but i don't think i lost points in non-science so i think most of those gpa deductions were within science classes for my mcat score i ended up with a 523 very exciting i'll talk about how i studied for that in just a second my other elements of my application in terms of extracurriculars i had done a few service projects some research and some ems work as an emt in transport now i'll run through all three of those just real quickly in terms of service projects i had started joining some clubs and working with other institute you know organizations i ended up moving on to starting my own kind of organizations focused on things that i was really particularly passionate about i ended up starting an organization called the teach initiative that's working on mental health and substance use education in north carolina high schools and other kind of uh spaces that was incredibly important to me for a variety of reasons that i won't get into but it you know something i was passionate about i've also done some work along the lines of cherokee language revitalization another personal passion project and something that you know i've been excited about i want to say for both of those it's critical to point out that those are the result of a ton of work by a ton of people not just me i got massive amount of support from other folks at unc and elsewhere so huge huge props to those folks and i want to be clear none of that would have been remotely possible if i had been trying to do things by myself so maybe first tip team building is super important um and uh of course you know having folks around who are ready to jump in and help is uh legendary so that's that um and various other kind of um smaller service projects but those are the main two in terms of research i have been working in a research lab at unc uh since my first year there i have kind of moved up and done some more independent projects a lot of my research especially work in cell culture working with neurons and microglia has been pretty dramatically unsuccessful so i say that because if there are any folks out there who are doing research and the research hasn't been working out trust me i've been there for years i know the feeling so that's been the case with a lot of my research i ended up being able to pull some stuff together and i finished my honors thesis recently so i have done the kind of research progression but you should know that if research isn't working out for whatever reason you know i've been there and i know the feeling on i also was part of another research project working on mental health and substance use and what not in unc students kind of a survey-based project as distinct from my kind of cell culture animal behavior type work in the first lab both of those are great and very much exploratory i'll talk in a bit about kind of exploring your passions and again for that for both of those is just things that i was personally interested in that's that now last thing uh ems work and generally exploring medicine i did a little bit of shadowing not a ton i shadowed i think maybe five-ish maybe 10-ish physicians usually not for a long time just for about a day for the most part or a couple days great experiences though i learned a lot about medicine and learned a lot especially about options of careers in medicine more importantly though i did a lot of ems work i started as an emt around when kovid hit that was my sophomore year i had gotten pulled back from my study abroad program so i tried to become an emt i was mostly entirely i've worked in transport not in 911 type emergency medical services it's been an incredible experience for me especially someone who's interested in psychiatry and transport we're not dealing with super emergent cases right we're just kind of taking people from place to place what that means is that you have the opportunity to chat with incredible folks all the time for hours on end sometimes so that's been a wonderful experience and something that i highly recommend in terms of exploring whether you really would enjoy medicine those are some of my extracurriculars in terms of my essays i wrote about a lot of stuff mostly very personal stuff i kind of got into why i'm interested in medicine why i'm interested in psychiatry in particular one of the main points a lot of my essays was the idea that i've spent time exploring and have come to the conclusion based on evidence that medicine is right for me which is true i don't have any family that are physicians or anything like that i thought for a long time that i wanted to go purely research and various other uh options and whatnot i just have tried a ton of stuff and eventually settled down on yeah okay clearly i have thoroughly enjoyed my experiences in medicine they've kind of clicked with my brain the way that other things don't and so this is something that i need to be doing in my career that i think um i hope was compelling uh the idea that you know i've kind of tried different things and found yep this is the thing then also of course there's other sort of personal thoughts i told a lot of stories i tended to not try to just list things because you do have the opportunity to share all of your extracurriculars and whatnot in the application elsewhere so i tried to not just list um but definitely you know i told a lot of stories and gave a sense of tried to give a sense of the kind of person that i wasn't why i was interested that's that now those are that's the essays the stats the everything last thing i want to share is a little bit of just some advice that i picked up during the cycle that people told me that i want to pass on to anyone watching my youtube videos so uh first off the timeline the advice that i received is that applying kind of in the middle of the cycle is actually sometimes a good thing and that applying early is not always super ideal this is very controversial you'll hear from almost all pre-med advisors and what at least i did that you have to apply as early as possible otherwise your toast it's not true at least according to i talked to a person affiliated with johns hopkins admissions and he said that applying early is not necessarily a great thing why because you're compared against the best of the vast the ideas of people who are most on top of things who are ready to rock are applying as soon as possible but if you apply a little bit later on you're compared more with folks who are slightly less kind of put together i don't know i was in that group so i you know just took a while for me to kind of get everything together so you're compared against other folks who are similarly a little bit behind you don't want to apply dramatically late just because things fill up but you know whenever you apply um it's not necessarily critical to get it super early for my cycle i did the mcat a month after my junior year of college ended i'm currently a senior unc so i did my mcat or i did my yeah mcat in uh june right i finished the semester on mayesh did the thing in june got scores back around july and submitted the primary application then and then i did my secondaries for a while afterwards so that's my timeline other thoughts that i have heard and that i think are really important the main one being that it's critical to do things that interest you right you want to do things that interest you why because you want to be able to speak to them and be able to say why you did them you want to be able to talk about them well for example in research right you want to do research that you personally find exciting if you find it exciting you'll explore as much as you can you'll read a bunch of papers you'll get into it and then once somebody asks you about it you'll be able to share all kinds of thoughts about that sort of thing about your research about why you did what you did etc same goes for ems same goes for whatever also i think it's critical to be aware of what you're interested in to kind of check in what am i interested in what do i have time for is very important and how can i be doing the things i'm excited about at the maximum of my capacity a couple things there right kind of three things number one again if you find that what you're interested in isn't medicine okay there are a lot of lot of ways fabulous ways to help people to get involved to support folks etc i considered a lot of these different options and many of them are excellent if you find that what you're pulled to is not necessarily the pre-med stuff cool you'll have i think a wonderful career doing whatever those things are or you know if you want to pursue medicine obviously you know do so but i think be cognizant of what you're being pulled to intrinsically also there in terms of being most efficient make sure you keep track of the things you get yourself into i have definitely over scheduled myself some of that was good frankly early on i over scheduled myself quite a lot i ended up having kind of a terrible semester i didn't sleep a lot it was awful that said it set me up really well for having things on my resume that i ended up applying with and and getting in with that said as time went on i wanted to make sure that those things that i had started during my super intense time i wanted to make sure that i was doing them to the most to the you know to my kind of maximal capacity and so i dropped back on a lot of things to make sure that i could focus on the things that i wanted to do and really do them well that's really critical i hope you all do that too make sure that whatever you're doing you're doing it well the last thing on that sleep please sleep just do it it's really important i will say this i have rarely you know i know a lot of folks will say i can't sleep because i need to do such and such acutely i understand 100 there have been many times not before tests but many times when you need to do some kind of project in my personal experience when i've had to just you know you just gotta pull an all-nighter and do some sort of project i get it that sort of thing happens from time to time chronically losing sleep though makes you inefficient i've done this so i know it makes you inefficient and what that inefficiency means is that you don't get enough out of your time so whenever you're really chronically sleep deprived you're not getting your money's worth of the time that you do have and so you end up actually having less effective time than you would have if you spent the extra few hours sleeping and then we're able to be really sharp during the waking hours that's important and something that i hope you all do as well also of course exercise keep taking care of yourself etc all these things are really critical i'm someone with adhd if you also have adhd exercise can be very important keep active i find myself incredibly distractible always but especially whenever i don't exercise so that's also important okay so that's all the thoughts i have for you today um thank you so much for watching my youtube video uh and i'm excited for your journey uh good luck to you and and i'm sure you'll kill it and have a great time thanks bye

Channel: Ben Gorman

Views: 76,035

Keywords: Harvard Medical School, Medical School, How to get into medical school, How to get in to medical school, med school stats and acceptances

Id: SbGOwhv_I8w

Length: 16min 44sec (1004 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 18 2022