No Interviews Despite His 514 MCAT Score and 4.0 Postbac GPA | Application Renovation (S3 E9)

this is the do application and this is what i highly highly discourage students from doing [Music] application renovation season three episode nine how are you doing today good good glad to be here dr gray i'm excited to have you here i'm excited to take a look at your application and a comis application i like to switch it up every now and then see the different applications or at least the pdfs that are printed from the applications let's hear from you where you think things went a little astray this cycle uh i think zero interviews at this point in the cycle that's correct um i think in a perfect world i would have applied earlier i had a little bit of a transcript snafu which delayed my application um a fair amount um i think my gpa is on the lower side so it would be great to improve that and the last thing i think i could see adcoms wondering if my clinical experience was rushed and maybe questioned my commitment to medicine so i think those are the three areas that i highlighted but i'm okay i'm interested to see what you think okay one of the notes that you had left uh with the application was that you think your lors may have been a little bit weaker talk about why you think that i think i i'm 28 years old so i've been out of college for um six years now wow um so when i was reaching out to my old professors um it was common to have them say i i honestly don't remember you which of course i understand they have so many students every year um so i think um i'm of course i don't see my your letters of wreck or i didn't see them but i'm sort of dubious as to whether or not they wrote me a very you know strong heartfelt letter not not having spoken to me for so long i can answer that for you they didn't uh yeah my question is why did you get lors from professors from many years ago as a non-trad student most schools will kind of waive their normal required lors and we just get a work supervisor or a volunteer supervisor instead of getting old professors that are going to write you bad lors i did get both of those as well i got a letter of wreck from work and a letter of wreck from a volunteer coordinator which is uh obviously more up to date but i i was under the impression that i would need at least one science letter of wreck for most of the schools that i applied to i did reach out to a sampling of schools and i think most of them did want at least one science letter of wreck and so i i had to kind of reach back into yeah or go back in time into the archives yeah as long as you go and talk to the schools and say hey i've been out of school for this long do i really need a science letter like they're not going to remember me if you did that work and the school still said yes then it is what it is unfortunately yeah i will say i did meet with the people who wrote my letters and had a bit of a refresher so so maybe it isn't as bad as i'm i'm making it out to be but yeah okay good all right ready to dive into your app let's do it all right when did you actually submit your application the akomasapp doesn't tell me that so this i i submitted akomas apps over about a two or three week period i believe this one that you have in your hand was submitted in mid august okay mid august so a little bit later in the cycle all right so akomas obviously if you've been watching application renovation for a while very different than the amcas application some different kind of information that it asks for right there's some interesting things like what kind of geographic area are you from um have you ever been to a health professions program all this kind of stuff um when we dig into stats right away the first thing that comes up is mcat score you crushed your mcat score great job there thank you what's what's interesting is psych soch was your um was your worst section and a lot of people do well on that section because a lot of it's just memorization did you take that one for granted uh yeah you know you you hit the nail on the head that was my my strongest uh section for all my my practice tests so i think i kind of like lapsed on my knowledge of it and just kind of choked on the day so that was kind of a bummer but yeah that is that is always what happens you're like um i don't need to study that one anymore and then it's like exactly it gets you okay uh still a great score overall your mcat score is not going to hold you back from any place um we get into grades grades for the most part nothing stands out some c's here and there um lots of b's some more c's here we get some a's when we get down to um kind of the the grade table the gpa table again very different than amcas and we see here math was your arch nemesis organic chemistry it's very cool how how uh akomas breaks it down by subjects i really like that and then by year so this is cumulative by year three to nine big drop there sophomore year went up again junior year and then kind of flatline for senior year with your kind of bachelor finishing out at three two three you did do a post back though which is great only about 18 credits typically would like to see a little bit more um but having that upward trend is is really good so good job with that uh and then final cumulative undergraduate gpa 332 so not too shabby there your science gpa 15 credits here for your post back 4.0 science uh baccalaureate 315 and 326 overall so again good job this postback definitely going to help my potential concern is that it just wasn't enough enough credit hours um i'm not necessarily looking at this final number anymore once you have kind of some semesters like this that are just going to tank you forever the the upward trend of how many credits you have here really important got it um so gpa potentially is going to be a hindrance for you um mcat obviously we mentioned solid nothing to be concerned about there got your emt certificate in here uh and then we get into activities so activities on a comas again very different 600 character limit here compared to 700 for amcas just some random knowledge there uh talking about woodworking and obviously a big hobby for you talking about um just kind of what what you like to do so you're you're a a craftsman at the end of the day you like working with your hands putting things together you mentioned here that it led you to uh to engineering great correct nothing nothing too special there uh i like these extracurriculars these hobbies talking about cycling again very interesting a lot obviously lots of hours i was starting to get a little concerned i saw 10 hours here a week 10 hours here a week and i'm like that's a lot of hours a week already and just these two hobbies um but i didn't really see any other concerns with other hours that didn't necessarily make sense like well that's adding up to like 80 hours a week do you really have that time i didn't see too much there my biggest concern of your whole application is this one experience oh interesting okay this is my biggest concern of your whole application first off whenever you say permit to contact no i would have left it off your application okay what are you hiding that you don't want me to go find out right so when when a student says you're not allowed to contact this person it's automatically a huge red flag for me okay the bigger red flag is what you said right so you're you're working as this a kind of volunteer emt working with calmat setting up um kind of this kobe 19 team and you said you ended up stepping down from the deployment because we ran out of ppe and i felt my team was being sub subjected to undue risk it was a difficult decision to leave my teammates behind but i wanted to make a stand to my superiors that lack of ppe was intolerable as you were making this stand guess what was happening in the hospitals around the country people are still having to go to work people were still going to work without proper ppe right and here you are how brave of you to say i'm taking a stand i'm not going to do this that i i understand why you did it but to focus on that in your application while knowing that physicians and nurses and physical therapists and respiratory therapists and everyone in the hospital at the same time is saying you know what this is my job this is what i got to do yeah it sucks yeah i'm pissed yeah i'm screaming from the rooftops that that this is not right but i have patience to see this is what i signed up for right and there were physicians who stopped working around this time because of this and and that's that's for them to decide that that's what they need to do and i'm not judging them i'm judging you because number one you're here and you're you asked me to judge you but i'm judging this as a pre-med student who hasn't gotten to the point yet where you're in the career and you can make that decision for your career i question your dedication when something like this happens again that you're just going to walk off and say sorry this isn't safe i don't want to deal right if if i'm an admissions committee member and i'm an emergency medicine physician and i happen to be reviewing your application i would say nope i don't want this person working next to me they're gonna they're gonna run away at the first sign of hardship okay that is the biggest red flag in your application to me you know it's really interesting that you say that because this was an activity that i really wrestled with i i knew it was controversial and i knew that it was risky to put in um but i i completely understand what you're saying and i i do agree with it and i think my one rebuttal is that i i think it's the next activity i did actually find a another covid unit to be a part of and it had better conditions so i i did go back into the hot zone so to speak and this this activity was just it was it was a very hard decision for me to make and i i still actually grapple with it um to this day but i i do understand and the the not permitting to contact them because i did leave on not the best term so that's why i checked no for that but um i i completely i understand that i think it's a good point that you're making yeah and and i'll probably get a lot of hate from students that that it's my privilege speaking when i say that and i understand there are lots of people i've talked to lots of people who left their job because of lack of ppe because of risk of exposure because of their loved ones who they lived with who are high risk i understand why people left the jobs that they left what i'm saying to you specifically is how you mentioned right that it there's lack of ppe and i'm making a stand right if you said that the risk was too great and i i live at home with someone who uh who is high risk and i didn't want to put them at risk that's a completely different argument okay and which actually is the case so maybe i should communicate that better so and it's a completely different argument it may it's the same outcome but a different argument that i see i understand i can empathize with that i can't empathize with someone that it makes it look like you threw a temper tantrum and stormed off right yeah so yeah completely different things i just want to clarify so that cool i mean i still get hate on youtube because that's just um all right so next experience another another healthcare experience we love the care experiences good amount of hours here um and then again working covet 19 pandemic the the thing that i marked up here at the end was i learned how the clinical setting is only one step in providing care and how important social workers and other community institutions are to health outcomes right for that to be your takeaway like that's super common of course right you don't need to have that experience to know that there's lots of things involved in healthcare outcomes right so just a week a week takeaway okay we get some shadowing which is great um nothing nothing too special there but uh gotta gotta love the shadowing so it's good you get it on there um emt class again i typically don't like the the statements of this lesson taught me right it taught me that blah blah blah because usually when you say this lesson taught me or or i learned that where you're typically going is trying to sell the admissions committee i understand what it's like to be a doctor and that's not the goal of this process the goal of this process is help me understand who you are and help me understand the impact that you've had on the world and and world is this specific experience um the experience here so hospice companionship right again this reinforced the holistic side of medicine so very generic kind of takeaway and one that i think you're forcing because this is the do application and you're like oh does are holistic right and so you're you're kind of forcing this narrative and and i just i've seen enough of these applications i know it's worth trying to do um so just takes away from who you are um this one here so you're working as an engineer this is kind of your main gig obviously 8 000 hours over many years i loved how you wrote this right for this type of job for this type of experience you show your impact through numbers that's typically where you can go and so talking about increasing performance by 15 reducing a million dollar spend right invented three products one is being patented right that shows impact and shows who you are so i love that okay um one question about that so so i work in a research and development lab i think i'm not sure if it asked for this on the dl application but on the amcas application it did ask is this research and i labeled it as research and i know this is kind of a gray area would you not label it as research um r d is probably the closest thing to research as anything else okay because what you're doing in r d right research and development for those of you don't know what r d means r d is you as a team have this question right you're you're given this mission right i love talking about steve jobs i love steve jobs biography when when he was building the the first mac right the the mac one he went he went to this guy who was the the king of power supplies and he said i want the power supply to be yea big and and no bigger and only put off this amount of heat and the guy's like i can't do that well no you can that's what r d is for go figure it out right and so the question is how do i do that it's the scientific method is r d how do i do this let me create some experiments around figuring out how to do this thing how to answer this question let me gather some data analyze the data come to some conclusions crap we missed our mark let's go back to the drawing board right that's what research is you just happen to be doing it in a in an environment where you're creating things and not necessarily solving solving hunger right or whatever whatever research we want to talk about right not in a in a lab learning the function of some cells that we don't know anything about yeah right so i i would say it's research okay cool um liquid chromatography field service engineer cool fancy title right so again set a record raising f 4.5 million in annual sales and service revenue again numbers numbers numbers numbers that's great um i don't like oh that was loud i don't like the tie-in to healthcare right you don't know what being a physician is like and i don't need you to tell me how you're going to take all of your skills from outside of healthcare and tie them into healthcare right yes from from any kind of lay person will understand that working customer service or working in a kind of customer oriented field is obviously going to give you a leg up when it comes to taking care of patients because you are interacting with people and learning how to communicate and problem solving and all this stuff and dealing with people who are unhappy sometimes right and learning how to deal with that of course that's going to help i don't need you to tell me that in an application i think it's a distraction i think it's a waste of space i'd rather you not little selling exactly selling selling selling um some more healthcare experiences non-healthcare experiences nothing dramatic here we have this volunteer here um this race team captain i really like the story so you told a story here with this one of right i'm the team captain and here's a story of a time where i was challenged as the captain i was put in this position this dilemma that i had what do i do and you told the story you didn't try to sell anything you didn't try to tie it to medicine you just told the story of trying to understand someone's situation and it came across great this is this is one of the best stories i've read so great job there um some achievement credit nothing special there um team leader all around blah blah blah then we get into the achievements category okay so good job with the activities for the most part other than that one big big red flag that i think was there and then we get to your personal statement your personal statement was a close tie for the worst part of your application okay but but we we're the other one kind of came in first and so personal statement personal statements are good to be the worst part of your application because those are easy to fix right it's when your gpa is horrible that's hard to fix your mcat score is horrible that's hard to fix personal statements those are easy to fix they just need to be rewritten um and so let's talk about your personal statement a personal statement is why do you want to be a doctor i don't think you necessarily answer that question i don't know if you were trying to answer that question but let's go ahead and get into this so right off the bat you lead with a story which is good you're trying to hook me you this pastry-shaped machine i think is funny like i can picture that i i know exactly what you're talking about right so that's that's good and then you talk about being four years old being an epidural a epileptic it's always hard for me to say um and and right off the bat i'm concerned that that's a red flag for some people epilepsy usually isn't something that goes away a lot of childhood epilepsy does the question is like what's going to happen in medical school when you're stressed to the bone you have lack of sleep all of these things where guess what guess what is a very easy trigger for epilepsy and for seizures it's lack of sleep stress lots of caffeine um and so right off the bat i'm concerned like is epilepsy going to be a problem for you moving forward i hope not i'm gonna take i'm gonna take you at your word that your caesar's seizures have subsided again like a lot of childhood epilepsy it's just not a problem so yeah i i haven't had a seizure since i was six years old so yeah yeah yeah again just like a minor thing like a minor question but it's your seed right and i always talk about like if there's something that's a red flag on your application should you talk about it in your personal statement and the answer is if it's a big reason why you want to be a physician then you probably should and this is for you so um i i definitely would leave it it's just one of those things to know that someone may go yeah i don't want to deal with that right unfortunately i think most physicians will understand again childhood epilepsy a lot of it's bad some of it goes away you you are one of the lucky ones yeah um all right so then we get to more of the story right this was a formative experience for you great got that my answer to though what do you want to be when you grow up question changed from professional baseball player to pediatrician i typically don't like getting this super meta of like literally answering the question inside of the the essay and so that's just a style thing that i don't like okay a lot of students do something similar to this uh they'll they'll say something very similar they'll say when i was asked why i want to be a doctor i would always say x but now i say blah blah blah right it's something i see a bunch so i would just avoid that kind of thing and tell me the story of how you went from baseball player to pediatrician and so you say i wanted to tackle medical problems and provide research to kids who were confused and scared like i had been i think typically in my personal salmon book if you've read that i talk about the seed and then watering the seed you went straight from the seed of having epilepsy uh as a kid having these seizures as a kid straight to i want to be a doctor and and provide reassurance to kids who are confused right usually that's something you get to after experiences of being around people being around patients being around physicians right you jumped straight into it which i think is is not the right tactic yeah okay so just uh um you drew too straight of a line from i had epilepsy to i want to be a doctor i i i want to see everything in between okay um and then we get to more sales pitch stuff so you you talk about uh in over the years you've embarked on your path to medicine working as research and development engineer and now i'm confused you said you had epilepsy you want to provide reassurance to people and be a pediatrician why are you an engineer right something obviously changed or you're not telling me the full story or something's off here because if you're saying you want to be a pediatrician why aren't you a pediatrician at this point okay okay so so lots of questions i'm getting um so you start with engineer and then later as an emt and hospice volunteer okay experiences have taught me how to problem solve write the sales pitch problem solve using scientific methods right while instilling the importance of basic empathy and listening and caring for patients okay so right off the bat you write and and you think like an engineer which i see this all the time with engineers who want to go to medical school is their writing is very engineering based right this experience has taught me how to problem solve great got it you think being a doctor you you need problem solving while instilling the importance of basic empathy and listening and caring for patients right a lot of times when i see this from engineers specifically you're trying to show i'm not like those weirdo engineers i actually have empathy and can communicate it's trust me like i'm not one of them uh and so i usually chuckle when i see that kind of stuff but again most of this is sales pitch i don't need it okay um all right you studied biomedical engineering i don't need it don't need it in your personal statement i don't i don't care about that you're interested in technology and medicine great lots of lots of pre-meds study biomedical engineering nothing too special about that um investigated cutting edge medical advances great right gave me an analytical framework for solving problems you already told me you love problem solving you like drop it i don't need that anymore okay so you're focused on skill skill skills and i want to know why do you want to be a doctor okay so you um you get into this story of developing this framework of new technologies rewarding you found um to be filled with unexpected complications uh you were asked to build a robust analytical chemistry instrument and during this phase inconsistent results frustrating uh fruitless troubleshooting blah blah what changed right and so i i keep asking myself why am i reading this why am i reading this why is this important that's what i'm i'm constantly asking myself as i'm going through this okay it turned out that you received a batch of bad media right or media just changed chemical properties skewed your results and then i get into okay now i know why you told me this because you wanted to sell me on the act of systematically breaking down the problem into the unchanged and changed variables allowed me to diagnose the issues quickly over time this method is invaluable in my work wow okay got it you're an engineer you got it right this this this is an example of how can i tell you i'm an engineer in in many different ways yeah okay why do you want to be a doctor you're selling me on skills that you think are going to be important and set you apart as a physician okay so you're focused on the wrong thing right while cultivating while cultivating these skills has been immensely gratifying i realized that i wanted to apply them outside of a lab setting i yearns to interact with patients directly and provide reassurance and compassion okay now your story is changing here you said i had seizures i want to be a pediatrician here you're saying i was an engineer and i realized i wanted something else yeah okay your story changed four paragraphs in that's a big problem reinforced by the feeling that i was a bystander when it came to addressing inequities in healthcare where does this come from right inequities in healthcare to me you're throwing that in as this token thing because okay there's nothing else in your application so far in your personal statement so far that talks about inequities in health care and so to me this is very common for students to drop these just token token words in okay i like serving the underserved really say that anywhere else right so just be careful with that kind of stuff um talking about the bay area your daily right to work my desire to change careers as i pass populations disproportion disproportionately burdened by lack of housing and medical access living in the shadow of billion dollar corporations got it right definitely understand san francisco huge issues how do you know that riding your bike by these people they have medical access issues right you don't you're just throwing it out there and so again just some token messages that you're throwing out there because you think that's going to show i understand the problems in health care therefore i'm ready to solve them by systematically breaking down the problem my engineering talk so this this to me i wrote here not not specific to medicine at all not really sure why it's there all right so let me move on so next step becoming a certified emt again if if you said you wanted to be a pediatrician earlier why weren't you involved in health care before now so that's that's a big question mark at least with the story that you were trying to sell in your your personal statement so you become a medical assistant great underserved bayview neighborhood san francisco i just highlighted this because it's wasted characters i don't need kind of the setting of where was where was that okay um you have this patient so i love that you're trying to tell the story of of mrs lee here and her blood pressure right and then you get right back into engineer speak right what changed what were the variables that changed and so just trying to sell sell sell i have these skills as an engineer this is going to help me uh problem solve right and so you get to this story i really like the story other than the sales pitch side of it and then the lack of why medicine as a reflection right you say i relished working together with her to find a solution to her problem solution equals engineer problem solving you've sold me that over and over and over and over again and typically and i've i've talked uh i forget who i think it was laila amiri from university of illinois who said there was there was one student who kept applying to her school who had a very bad personal statement probably not unlike yours that made it come across that you were interested in solving problems not helping patients right and she said it beautifully she said something along the lines of i don't want you to see my patients as problems to solve i want you to see my patients as people to help okay so that is a very again very engineering-based mindset problem-solving problem-solving problem-solving i want you to see these people as people and be compassionate be empathetic etc which is what you tried to force me um uh force on me wherever you mentioned empathy earlier i forget where that was oh yeah here basic empathy right like i swear i'm empathetic what can i solve your problem um so again just just big big problem there all right so then you're volunteering at hospice and again you get into storytelling which i like but then you come here at the very end i realize that being a physician and working with patients means addressing medical problems from two sides right the side that my engineering and emt training prepared me for but also from purely compassionate angle so it's like oh right the engineer is finally breaking out of his shell i guess i have to care about their side of things too right this approach to patient care draws me to osteopathic medicine and is what i hope to use and become better at in medical school and beyond so this is the do application and this is what i highly highly discourage students from doing is dropping in this token osteopathic medicine like i'm just showing you that i wrote this specifically for you do schools right nowhere in your application does it talk about osteopathic medicine nowhere in your application does it talk about osteopathic philosophies other than what you were trying to highlight earlier in that experience where you talked about holistic medicine right holistic care and so to me like this is just a token name drop right just like just like we had this token um or wherever it was earlier um inequities in healthcare right this token little drop here so i completely ignore that and i was like stop stop trying to force this in right okay um and then your conclusion is not horrible but it's what i call a recap conclusion where you're basically just relisting everything that you told me about already right talking about dr s talking about the excellent care she provided talking about engineering and emt service and hospice right you're just re-listing everything that you're doing where i think conclusions should go is what do you hope to aspire to be as a physician one of the questions i like to ask students is when you retire what do you hope your patients say about you right think kind of big big picture aspirational there okay um and that's really it um on the amcas application i was going to scroll down here um the amcas application does have a the kova 19 question here i i really liked what you did with this right these experiences have only affirmed my desire to become a physician to continue to improve the lives of others during good and bad times right so nice nice little statement there um that's supported with your answer and that is it okay what are your thoughts um i think i i think you you gave me some great points especially on the the personal statement i guess i think i was a little unclear my goal with the personal statement was just to i guess explain my my journey to medicine in that i i started as an engineer i felt sort of powerless and i at with these issues that i saw and that led me to um you know hospice and emt and that's what's really reaffirmed my want to go to medical school yeah so i can i can see that you thought you were doing that yeah but in the execution you missed because number one you told me right at the beginning that you wanted to be a pediatrician from the very beginning but then you have this detour of engineering so there's some confusion there yeah and then you go from engineering to emt because of inequities and seeing homeless people and their medical lack of access to care that's a big leap from i'm an engineer to i'm gonna go solve these health inequities unless you're recalling your time from a kid where you were helped by dr s and everything that happened and going to that donut-shaped machine et cetera right then that makes a little bit more sense so i think the timeline was a little off and in what you were saying and how you were saying it and then from that point forward again you were focused on this engineering side of problem solving and not necessarily focused on why taking care of a patient really motivated you to be a physician other than it allows me to continue to be an engineer just in this difficult setting yeah i guess i i know exactly what you're saying but my last paragraph with hospice what really i wanted to convey and what is 100 the truth is i definitely am an engineering personality and i i like to solve problems and be very active but hospice is this this situation where you're kind of devoid of any interventions or anything you're just kind of going there and being with the patient and that's what i kind of made an about face and realized that that is really what fulfills me and that is why i want to be a doctor is so i can do that for people and not so much the just viewing a patient as a puzzle or a problem because that's that's definitely not the not what i want to convey and how i feel yeah okay just tell that better got it yeah just just do a better job of tying that together other than oh yeah i guess patients do have this other side to them too yep yep okay um so for for you the question um really is continued healthcare experiences making sure you're getting those the mcat obviously isn't an issue for you um your gpa and post back classes potentially getting some more post-bac credits um just to put that under your belt but then i think just the the story um really tying tying together the story in a better way that's less focused on i'm an engineer i like to problem solve got it okay one other thing i wanted to ask is do you think it would be worth quitting my job as kind of a quitting my job and going and working as an emt full-time um would that be something that would show adcoms that i'm committed do you think there's any question to my of my commitment to medicine because some people have voiced that concern to me that's always a thing that comes up for non-trad students is if you want to be a physician then you should be working full-time in some sort of medical field i don't buy into that because not everyone can do that right the the job that you have now will likely pay you a lot better than being an emt exactly yeah so i don't i don't think it's a black or white issue i think there's some gray area to where maybe your job allows you to work 30 hours a week instead of 40 or whatever you're working now so that you can pick up a couple shifts as an emt and now you're still paying the bills but you're also getting a lot more experience in a clinical setting so i don't think it's an all or none um so i think it's a very personal question if you have the the kind of runway to uh in a savings account to make it so that you can go work full-time as an emt and quit your job and you would prefer that and you would like that sure go ahead have fun but i wouldn't do it just because you think it'll look better on an application okay i guess uh i wrote down how do you think i can amplify my strengths and i i don't want to say that don't just okay stop right there you don't okay um three episodes ago episode seven so this is nine episode seven of application renovation we started that conversation of trying to highlight strengths and i pointed out the whole application where the student tried to highlight strengths she fell completely flat and watered down her story got it you don't need to sell your strengths in your application you just need to tell your story about who you are and the impact that you've had on this world not okay i'm empathetic i'm compassionate i'm hard working i'm dedicated i'm a problem solver right none of that means anything other than words that you think are important yeah it makes sense i guess yeah i've been listening to you for years and it's surreal having you you say this to me because i of course i don't sell don't don't try to and it's it's very different it can be very different in in the business world right the world that you're in right now because as an engineer coming in like you want an engineer who says like i'm the best engineer ever right because that's a that's a very specific skill that a company is hiring for that they may or may not have time to teach right for for a very analytical position a very specific position like an engineer like i want someone who can come in and show me their their portfolio of how awesome of an engineer they are okay and have them back that up for medical school i'm going to teach you how to be a medical uh be a physician in medical school i'm going to teach you everything you need to know residency is going to teach you even more about how to be a physician i'm hiring you right literally hiring you accepting you based on your passions and your understanding of this world that you're getting into making sure that you like it and that you're doing it for the right reasons not because you think patients are just problems to solve but because you like being around patients you love that compassion that empathy and taking care of them and and yes solving their problems right at the end of the day you do have to solve their problems um i'm hiring you for that i'm accepting students for that i'm gonna teach you the skills that you need to know right you don't need to come in with skills your your academic proficiency with your mcat and your gpa tell me that you're smart enough right i don't need to tell me that you're smart your mcat your gpa everything in your activities shows me that you're dedicated you don't need to tell me that you're dedicated right it shows me that you're hard working i don't need to tell me that you're hard-working right so at the end of the day i care about your story and why you're doing this more than why you think you're capable of doing it okay yeah it's great it's great advice i super appreciate it yeah what else any other questions do you think as i applied to both md and d.o do you think i should just highlight or i guess maybe concentrate more on do schools because of my gpa or do you think i have a chance at md schools i guess yeah you always have a chance um the the 18 hours or so of post-bac credits at a 4.0 will help the question will be does each medical school which they do what is their potential cut off for an upward trend right with your gpa being around a 3-2 how many credits of postback will they want to see now i typically say 25 hours my colleague it mapped dr scott wright who's the former director of admissions at ut southwestern says 45 hours so there's there's some question marks in there now you are an engineer do you get any slack for in your gpa for being an engineer in school not really like a lot of a lot of students think oh they'll they'll bump me up 0.4 gpa because of my major and it just doesn't work like that so i i think if you want to make yourself more competitive for every school or if you're specifically interested only in md schools then then you probably would want to take a few more classes as a post-bac student to have more credits in that in the sciences as a postback at a 4.0 and that potentially opens you up to more more people to get an lor from as well true okay great well hopefully this will give you some ideas on how to improve this your story moving forward as to why you want to be a physician and the experiences you've had i think you've done most of the hard work already it's just another common example of of the story just not coming through in a personal statement and not intriguing medical schools enough to to really want to invite you for an interview yeah i guess i gotta buy that t-shirt you have the the tell your story t-shirt story matters yeah yeah but your story matters yeah very cool any other last-minute questions uh i don't think i i think you covered everything i i super appreciate this dr gray you've only been a guiding light during this crazy crazy time so i super appreciate uh being able to talk to you in person and i'm going to continue to listen to your your advice in the future i'm sure well awesome good luck to you and hopefully next application cycle will be a good one for you yeah it sounds good i'll keep you posted

Channel: Medical School HQ

Views: 36,482

Keywords: med school, premed, pre med, pre-med, medical school, application renovation, medicalschoolhq, mcat, gpa, bcpm gpa, medical school app, application, apply, doctor, medical, rejected, not accepted, medical school rejection, activities, activities section, rejected from med school, premed gpa, rejection, med school rejection, med school application, medical school application, med school apps, 514, 514 mcat, 514 mcat score, 4.0 gpa, postbac gpa, rejections, aacomas, aacomas application

Id: 4MMeWJaGKkI

Length: 48min 3sec (2883 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 30 2021