Why Was She Rejected With a 3.8 GPA and 511 MCAT? | Application Renovation (S3 E3)

you are missing out on the acceptances because of that missed connection to why [Music] welcome to application renovation season three episode three how are you doing today i'm good how are you i am good i'm excited to chat with you about your application and kind of where you are at in the process and between you applying for application renovation and now as we're recording this you actually have a new interview invite so hopefully you're gonna get accepted even uh even as we go through your application and show where we can strengthen moving forward but if you're not which i hope you are hopefully we'll have some good things to improve on moving forward talk about your application this is not your first application i believe you applied previously had some success with interviews didn't get in you've had at least one interview this cycle haven't gotten in yet where do you think things are falling off between getting the interviews but not getting the acceptances so the first time i applied last cycle i had four interviews i ended up on four wait lists i actually felt pretty confident like prepping for interviews and things like that and i was a senior in undergraduate and so i kind of chalked it up to maybe i got really unlucky i needed some more clinical experience like this one will be better and so i reapplied during covid after graduating didn't have a job yet so it like didn't like i had no way of showing that i had really changed anything because all i've done is do some online classes and so then i reapplied um ended up getting a job as a clinical medical assistant updated the schools that i could that would accept it and then had one interview like pretty early on in october with a school that i was on the waitlist for the previous year i was pretty excited about that i felt like it went really well probably better than the year before and then didn't hear anything and i started to get really confused because i thought that having more clinical experience like more experience with patients and stuff like that would have really helped and so i didn't really understand i ended up getting a interview invite last friday from another one of the schools that i was on the waitlist app so that felt really promising i'm not entirely sure they didn't accept updates so they don't know that i have this job and clinical experience so that's definitely something i want to share with them but between for this cycle i'm not really sure where i'm missing i kind of thought it was the clinical experience maybe it still is so okay all right good to know um so let's go and dive into your application and and see where some tweaks can be made to hopefully improve moving forward and i think i think there's some some things that stand that stood out to me as as i was reviewing it so the first thing that that i that i always love to point out is you applied early which is great right june 10th uh you're you were verified in less than a month before this year before the first wave of applications went out so very early on no no delays in your application which is great we look at your your kind of red flag area no institutional actions no uh misdemeanors convictions etc so those are those are good nothing to uh report there's is always a good thing and then we get to your grades and kind of scrolling down your list i see lots of a's which is always a fun thing to see some b's that's which is which are okay gpa wise solid right no issues with your grades uh kind of steady all across your years uh 379 science gpa 382 overall so solid gpa no concerns there and then an mcat score a 511 right right kind of right at the normal matriculation number how did you how did you do well on your mcat score the first time you took it um so i did the next step program where it like schedules stuff out for you and you can move it around i was taking classes at the time and so pretty much i would go to school during the day i'd come home i'd do homework for like two hours i'd switch to mcat do mcat for like two to three hours i'm pretty sure my roommates thought i was crazy yeah and it was definitely kind of the worst semester of my life i would go through i'd read the prep book i'd take the quizzes and then i did do i think seven practice tests and that did really help me with like timing and stuff like that just getting a sense of all of that because then when you sat down on the actual day it was really just like oh this is the last one thank goodness and it wasn't like super stress about all of the little pieces and so that was good there was like i was a little disappointed in one of my section scores on the biochem but then i did way better than i expected to on the psych one which probably makes sense because i was a neuroscience major so like all of that was just kind of beat into me but yeah yeah i was i was very proud of myself yeah you should be great score so stat wise no issues uh obviously the generic response is a higher mcat could always help more but i i would not consider a new mcat for you unless you you had to if yours expired as you move forward so looking at your extracurricular descriptions i think there's some room for improvement in some of them there were some grammar issues i don't know grammar is the right word punctuation issues you tend to not like to use commas that and i highlighted a bunch of spots where uh where um from a grammar punctuation issue that it was wrong but not gonna kill your application but is something that like makes me scratch my head but like what's going on here um right off the bat we get into your publications and your extracurricular description for your publication here is just the title and where it was published you could have gone more into depth here and talked about kind of the the back story of publish publishing this the struggles of publishing it a little bit more of a story to to show me who you are remember that your activity descriptions are your opportunity to expand more of who you are and it's not just a list of everything you've done and so this first one is just a list of what you did right here's this title here's where it was published so a missed opportunity there to expand a little bit more of who you are you have this epilepsy foundation of colorado peer mentor you listed it as not medical clinical would you potentially consider it medical or clinical or or was what you were doing strictly um just hanging out and not anything related to medical clinical i guess i'm not really sure i put it as not medical clinical because i didn't want it to seem like i was reaching for a clinical experience that i didn't have it was more of just like kind of talking to somebody who was like newly diagnosed kind of going through some struggles and things like that and just talking about like things that i had gone through resources that i had found things i wish i'd known earlier and things like that so it mostly was just talking more on like a not necessarily friend but like acquaintance basis of just like creating a connection with somebody that so they knew that there was somebody there yeah it's interesting i i personally probably would have listed that as medical clinical because because you're you're speaking from a point of view of a peer in in the sense that you have struggled with these same things and now you're helping them through those same things as well and it's not necessarily in a clinical environment you're not actually caring for them but you're offering advice and and really talking through your own personal history and so it's it's an interesting experience and not a common one that i've seen um i probably would have listed as medical clinical and let the school say yeah probably not um that's an interesting one uh i like the story that you told here right you're telling a story of this time with ava and and what what you did to help and and that whole situation so i i really like the story here so good job with that your next one here that the gala planning committee i think you could have expanded a little bit more and talked about the impact so a gala usually is fundraising right you're trying to raise money for something you could have gone into um the uh how much money was raised and potentially your impact in that to show who you are um when you're when you're doing this uh you did talk about go ahead i just like i didn't really know what to do about that one because it was a it was a gala that was supposed to be in like october of 2020 didn't happen in person they pushed it back to or it was supposed to be in april of 2020 they pushed it back to october of 2020 because of kovid and so they thought it was gonna be in person then it wasn't in person so like it hadn't even happened yet but we've been planning for like over a year so i just felt like i was in this awkward situation where i didn't want to not talk about it but there was like nothing substantial yeah um and i think potentially you you you could have talked about that flexibility and adaptability of needing to go well this was an in-person thing and we here are the changes we made to do it virtual and you could have potentially even talked about that story instead of just the gala instead and that would have showed some adaptability and stuff um so looking at uh the where else here so one of the the highlights here right of missing a comma so you said while i answered hundreds of phone calls i learned about medical billing right between phone calls and i learned there should have been a comma so just lots of missed commas in that situation um that i highlighted here and there again not application killing just something that stood out to me as i was reading it um yeah i'm uh looking at your neuroscience honors thesis nothing stood out there as good or bad so um just one of those experiences that it's really hard to highlight something super spectacular health equity volunteer you talked about um uh there was there was one little typo grammar thing for the extracurricular description um you said additionally many of our patients are immigrants are at high risk that i think it's missing an and in there right uh many of our patients are immigrants and are at high risk for tuberculosis um so again just a very common thing of just you've stared at this thing for a million hours and you don't see the things and that's where things like grammarly using a plugin like grammarly for your browser or they even have apps you can download to to really triple check everything you talked about the the most meaningful experience here you missed an opportunity to really focus in on on one of these stories of a family that you impact of a person who you impacted to really show who you are something that i highlighted here just to just to change the language a little bit you said it primarily serves a large population of illegal immigrants that's kind of historically what we've called um quote unquote aliens right are illegal immigrants the the problem the more proper pc terminology at this point is undocumented immigrants versus illegal immigrants um and then another common mistake again these these aren't application killers but i thought i'd take the opportunity to to pick them apart so don't think i'm i'm like trying to pick pick apart your application here these are just things that i want i want everyone to realize um you um in this situation because of the patient population you needed interpreters right and you were using the word translator for every word everywhere where you should have been using the word interpreter um and that's okay that's something i only learned recently uh because i'm doing a podcast about spanish learning spanish for pre-meds and it was taught to me just recently that interpreter is spoken word and translating is written word so i was like oh good to know so so just a change in words there um you that where potentially could have highlighted a story is you you you focused in on realizing the need to find a way to understand how a patient's primary culture impacts their health behaviors and how they respond to our treatment plan right you could have highlighted a story of a patient where that is shown so um could have gone there your personal caregiver experience so this looks like the bulk of your clinical experience at this point and if you weren't working as a medical assistant right now this is where i would say you need to focus in a lot more on your experiences personal caregiving definitely is medical clinical experience but it's usually weaker clinical experience for what medical schools will want to see your experience to be in to really highlight that you understand what you're getting yourself into and so the fact that you're working now as a medical assistant i think you've eased those fears of not having enough clinical experience and you now potentially being able to talk more about why you want to be a physician because you have all these other experiences now which is great um you i think you did a great job with the story of judy in this extracurricular description i really like the story that you told so good job with your stories for the most part just missing a couple here and there for some of the other ones the most meaningful experience for this one as a personal caregiver caregiver i thought was good where i think you missed an opportunity was to actually tell me why it was most meaningful you you actually have that statement in your extracurricular description essay the 700 characters where you say i want to ensure that i advocate for each unique patient and take care to guarantee that their treatment reflects this right that is potentially the reflection for your most meaningful essay you just happen to have it above in your extracurricular description so just a good away from most meaningfuls in gener in general is your answer you are answering the question why was this most meaningful to you as a person make sure you you literally answer that question um uh a couple other things here for the cu medicine book club another missing comma and then a missing period at the end which is usually like that would have made it 701 characters and so you just drop the the the period at the end and and lose that so just be careful with that um your children's ministry teacher was a little bit confusing with how you how you started this story because you say i walk in greet the other teachers and grab a chai before the kids show up so it's kind of different from your other storytelling and then now it seems like it's a little bit more present tense that you're you're telling it in so it's a little bit confusing right off the bat um and then something that i always love to point out because i'm a nerd is is legos is is all capital letters and no s so it's just lego okay it's a brand name so just a nerd thing that i always like to point out um here was one of the first times where you got into a little bit of selling right you said i learned the value of flexibility right be careful of of trying to go down that path of let me show you why i'm going to be an amazing physician or why i'm ready to be a medical student um the uh this the the selling that you did here and the explaining that you did here took away from the story that you were trying to tell so you said i i learned the value of flexibility and then you have here knowing when to step back and assess so you can adjust is sometimes more important right so a little bit more of that selling look at the traits and skills that i have um undergraduate research assistant a good good extracurricular description there which i really liked i i loved the little takeaway right the the process was taxing and felt endless but made eventual success much more rewarding so i really like that experience description your emergency department volunteer again you have this is not medical clinical but you you say here like i duck into a few patients rooms when they don't have any family members i ask if they need anything so it sounds like maybe there's some medical clinical interaction there uh but probably not the bulk of your experience so you you kind of uh defaulted to not medical clinical uh and so it's always one of those those balancing acts so um we talked a little bit about that earlier again a potential story right one of these patients where you ducked into the room tell a story of that interaction i'm sure there are some that stick out where you stayed a little bit longer and helped out a little bit more those types of stories really highlight who you are as a person again undergraduate research assistant the um this one you you focus a little bit more on the negative right you said you were an eager undergraduate you wanted to be spinning the blood and analyzing but you were stuck doing the paperwork right so it's weird that you you focused in a little bit more on the negative here instead of just highlighting your your impact on the the whole research so be careful with that negativity and then last one physician shadowing that you you have going over many months and 100 hours which is was plenty of shadowing and good consistency going there having a lifeguard on there was interesting so you you ended it with i saw that doing the right thing isn't necessarily what will make people happy with you but that standing by your decisions is just as important as knowing when to admit you are wrong what was that conclusion for i wasn't sure what you were trying to to to tell me in that in that sentence i was mostly just going for the lifeguard as like some like communication customer service experience in that like i don't think being a lifeguard helps me like clinically in any way but i think like interacting with really angry people and like sometimes just having to like stand up for it and like apologize that they're mad is what i was going for perfect i'm glad you told me that because that's what i assumed and i want to tell you that that is the wrong way to think about how to write these extracurricular activities right so so what you focused on is super common and what most students do is how can i translate this experience into shaping who i am either for me being a future physician or for it teaching me life skills right and so your conclusion is this is the life skill that it taught me that sometimes doing the right thing isn't going to make everyone happy so what i what does that have to do with who you are and and your journey to to being a physician and the journey to being a physician isn't really relevant right now because all i want to know with each of these activities is who are you not what skills did you learn from this okay so for everyone watching and and for you if hopefully you don't need to apply again but if you do need to apply again don't come at these experience descriptions from a standpoint of how can i show what i learned which is what a lot of students do which is where it's taking it from i'm going to sell to you to i'm just gonna show you who i am and the the ones where you did a great job was you told a story which has some kind of morals behind it but you didn't shove it down my face right you allowed me to read your story and i can take away what i want from it versus here you're shoving it down my face going you're gonna like me even more because i know that sometimes doing the right thing is hard okay so it's taking away from who you are uh when you do something like this um and then you have hobbies to round it out i love having hobbies on an uh on an application i think everyone should have at least one hobby on their application uh and you have your cooking here and and what you're doing and and i love the description here so good job all right now to your personal statement you ready uh but it's fine um so you have your opening here right you have a disorder it doesn't have you right you repeat that again and and you leave with um the impact that physicians can have on patients in crisis and what that means and i'm left with more questions than answers after reading this so i'm interested to know right obviously this was impactful for you and if we were to tie it together with your extracurricular activities my assumption is that you have epilepsy because you are a peer mentor for an epilepsy foundation but i don't know that reading your personal statement so if i were reading your personal statement as a standalone piece and i hadn't read your activities yet i'm left with a lot of questions like who are you what's going on what disorder do you have is it going to preclude you from being a physician i don't know yet and so i think if you want to tell the story i think you need to be more straightforward with a diagnosis and what that has meant to you because epilepsy well-controlled epilepsy not a problem obviously seizures happen and there's breakthrough seizures whatever right but i think most people in the medical world will understand that this isn't going to preclude you from from getting into medicine from being an amazing physician so i think you need to be a little bit more straightforward here and and a little bit less cryptic i think you were trying to be a little bit too cryptic and i don't know if that was just a a writing strategy to make it more intriguing or if you were trying to hide the fact that you have this epilepsy diagnosis what was your thought process there so i first wrote it before i had been a peer mentor so like if you read it without that you probably wouldn't know and i was really just kind of afraid of the stigma and people reading it and being like well medical school is really stressful you're going to lose a lot of sleep like maybe this isn't the right career for her and i'm just i'm really afraid of it like someone reading it and just kind of being like no i don't think so i like it's just too much of a risk yeah um it's it's hard right and there's there are two ways to go about it you can be a little bit more cryptic and get rid of the epilepsy peer mentor but i still think there are ways to be a little bit more cryptic and tell a little bit of a deeper story of being controlled on medications or whatever it is having gone through this process and and and uh not having any issues in x number of years right still being cryptic as to what's going on but giving some uh uh assuaging some fears if that's the right word into what what is going on so there there are two ways to do it i think if you keep the peer mentor in i think it's it's obvious what's going on and i think you'd be a little bit less cryptic if you want to remove it and i don't think there's a right or wrong answer i think it's whatever you're comfortable with um because it is true right one of the things that causes breakthrough seizures is stress and lack of sleep and all these other things guess what medical school is going to bring and and so i definitely understand your concerns and and it's going to be a personal thing for you as to as to how you decide to move forward the cat's out of the bag obviously this cycle with having the peer mentor thing in there so and you're getting interviews so not a big issue moving forward um but that's just something to think about for next application cycle if you get to that point um so a little bit less cryptic there because it just leaves me a lot of questions you get into storytelling right i love the stories you get into itis kitchen the retirement community tears dripping down her cheek a lot of what you did was going back to explaining and learning right i've learned what a good physician is i've learned what it's like to be in medicine and so a lot of a lot of this next paragraph is explaining and not really showing who you are many paragraphs are many sentences in a row right people are people not lab rats true doesn't tell me who you are medical decisions are not always made by medical professionals but by patients true doesn't tell me who you are right so you go on and on and on with these these statements and it's it's a lost opportunity for highlighting who you are why you want to be a physician so you you proclaiming that you know these things doesn't show me why you want to be a physician it's just saying i know these things these these things happen to be true um and then you get to for ida right that meant not continuing chemotherapy and ultimately again you finish with another statement ultimately medicine is about the person who has to live with the results of their treatment ideally you tell the story of ida and the impact that it made on you and and seeing the the impact that making this decision had on her and the reflection the takeaway needs to focus on why did this ultimately strengthen your decision to be a physician that would have helped me understand this impact a little bit more on who you are okay um again going into shadowing right observing the role of the of the physician is to evaluate the individual situation right so a lot of just explaining again what happened this is a good example of um a little bit of why i don't like shadowing in a personal statement is because you're just explaining what you saw the physician do and how the physician interacted and it's less impactful because it's not you actually having the impact and ultimately it doesn't necessarily drive to why medicine so that the takeaway here is that is how i would hope to be treated as a as a patient and to treat others as a physician which is a very common this is how i want to be as a physician versus this is why i want to be a physician so a difference there um again a little bit more uh moving forward you you talked about joy in the emergency department again good storytelling i love the foundation of your personal statement there's just some small tweaks of takeaways and other things that we we can focus on to make it much stronger um the the takeaway here one of the sentences here you said while i had good motives joy's reaction made me realize that i needed to be more intentional about how i speak with patients so again a little bit more of that here's what i learned and i'm i'm ready to be a physician because i know how to speak to patients now because of joy right versus focusing in on joy and what that did for you or to you and and what led you want to be a physician even more um so a lot of a lot of just statements here right uh how many people it took to give the best care medicine is a team sport you realize how important communication was so just a lot of basic statements that lots of students do that are distractions from who you are right this is a personal statement not a here's what medicine is statement and and that's where uh some some change of focus would make this much stronger um i really love the conclusion good strong conclusion here you want to be the physician that diligently works i'd probably change that to who the physician who diligence diligently works every day to use empathy and respect to positively impact the health and well-being of all patients right nice strong here's what i want to accomplish type statement there balance your understanding of the difference between medicine and science right of just really focusing in on bringing in some of those other ideas that you had laid out earlier which is something i don't necessarily recommend because then you're you're trying to have this really strong conclusion and then you're trying to tweak what you're doing everywhere else to fit your conclusion and so that's why sometimes i don't typically recommend this theme which you have of there's a difference between science and taking care of a patient right um it's a little a little tweak there potentially you're thinking of how to to format um any questions about the personal statement no i was helpful thank you yeah and then school lists talk about how you built your school list so i actually transferred during my undergraduate i started out in upstate new york and then ended up in colorado and i just found that i really can't live in certain locations based on my freshman year and so i kind of started with where do i think i can handle living and then like narrowed schools out from there and then picked trying to pick mostly private schools in those locations um i kind of got stuck because like new york has a ton of schools and i just wasn't willing to do that again and so i felt like i got a little bit trapped but and it's also a bummer to live somewhere that only has one in state school so well we will have another one coming soon here in colorado which is good uh but not soon enough for you unfortunately um and did you apply to do schools at all or no i did not i thought about it after the last one i had had some not great experiences with people who i knew that went to do schools and kind of felt like i had strong enough stats to get into md and it's not that i like have any prejudice against dio i was just like kind of afraid from what i'd heard okay interesting um yeah so school lists uh i think is decent lots of good schools on here i think makes it harder um right every medical school is hard to get into but then when you get to some of these big name schools it makes it even harder right baylor bu emery really really competitive really really tough schools to get into um and then a couple out-of-state public schools but it sounds like you understood the difference between public and private from your your comment earlier so i think the school list is decent other than just a lot of competitive schools but it sounds like you you did some research going into where you wanted to be which is good and looking at the school list so um i i think for you um clinical experience if if you weren't working as an ma as i mentioned earlier clinical experience would be the biggest thing for me because that extra clinical experience is going to translate in you being able to better verbalize and write about why you want to be a physician having having some deeper experiences interacting with patients having the deeper experiences being around physicians i think are going to translate in you being better able to say this is why i want to be a doctor and i think that is the the next thing is strengthening your personal statement next time around having those better reflections to focus in on why do you want to be a physician and not a lot about what you've learned or what you think you've learned about what it's like to be a physician or what it's like to be in healthcare i think those are really the biggest tweaks for you moving forward and and and my guess is and it's usually just from my anecdotal experience you are getting your your interviews based on your stats and and having some good experiences and you are missing out on the acceptances because of that missed connection to why do you want to be a physician and maybe a little bit more of the selling and and trying to focus everything all of your answers in on what you know about medicine and what your strengths are for medicine which are coming through a little bit in your extracurricular activities instead of just focusing in on who you are as a person answering the question without trying to sell the interviewer on your answer and so as you move forward with your your next interview that you have a little bit of advice is is really just be yourself don't worry about selling anything and and now that you have this extra medical assistant experience really focus in on why do you want to be a physician the experiences that you're having why it's motivating you to to wanna to leave every day and go i really wish i need to go to medical school as soon as possible because this is what i want to do with my life this is how i want to impact people i think those two tweaks in your upcoming interview will hopefully help although the school you're interviewing that i think has switched to an mmi which is you have a little bit of less ability to do that so questions um i guess just in terms of bringing it up in the interview if it like doesn't come up naturally at some point like if i get asked at the end like is there anything else you want the committee to know like obviously i want them to know that i have clinical experience but like how much would be helpful to say versus like be aggressive i i think you bring it up uh if there's anything else i think you really you really um hammer that home and then usually there's an opportunity with uh like a q a obviously right now everything's virtual and things are different and the school that you're interviewing at may have foregone mmi again this year because of everything being virtual um i'm not sure um but the usually even in the virtual environment there's still some presentation type sessions do you know if the school is having that with you um i i think it's not mmi this year it's like a group interview a group activity and an individual okay and are there any presentations like discussions with the dean of finance or anything like that dean of students yeah yeah so usually in those they're q a type opportunities and you can just say what's the best way to to update the school i know that you don't accept updates but there's this really big thing that's happened since my application uh that i think is going to affect my application how do i how do i bring that up so uh but usually there's gonna be an opportunity and you can potentially even fit it in in the one-on-one interview to say um just one one other thing i wanted to mention i just just added in there well good luck to you hopefully uh this this episode's gonna come out and and we don't even need you because uh you're gonna be on your way to medical school anyway so good luck to you and hopefully this is helpful thank you it is thank you

Channel: Medical School HQ

Views: 32,283

Keywords: med school, premed, pre med, pre-med, medical school, application renovation, medicalschoolhq, mcat, gpa, bcpm gpa, amcas, med school app, medical school app, application, apply, apply to med school, apply to medical school, how to get into med school, how to get into medical school, doctor, medical, rejected, didn't get in, not accepted, med school rejection, medical school rejection, 511, 511 mcat, 3.8, 3.8 gpa, science gpa, med school gpa, medical school gpa, mcat score, good mcat

Id: DG8nrWg_Aco

Length: 37min 11sec (2231 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2021