By: Ryan Kelly
The last thing you want is to waste a year of your life. Becoming a doctor already requires four years of med school and another four of residency, so unless you want to get a real paycheck before you’re 30, you’d better get a move-on. Right?
We hear this line of reasoning from lots of pre-meds, but it most often comes from parents, who know that the biological clock is ticking. In their eyes, if you want to have kids and have a life, you’d better get through medical school as soon as possible.
Since the dawn of time, there have been many different cultures and societies with various beliefs on medicine.
Ugh. Scratch that.
What exactly is ‘medicine?’ Webster’s Dictionary defines it as “the science and art dealing with the maintenance of health and the prevention, alleviation, or cure of disease.”
Oh god no.
By: Ryan Kelly
In our work with pre-meds, we hear all kinds of crazy claims. About 95% of the time we hear one of the above phrases, what follows is false. No, you don’t need 400 hours of shadowing to get into medical school. No, it doesn’t help to finish college in three years. And when you get a rejection letter, you shouldn’t call the medical school and plead to be given a second chance.
By: Rob Humbracht
The rule of thumb for letters of recommendation: Get the Best Set of Letters You Can.
It will be tempting to get lost in the nuances and details of how many letters to get, which people to choose, and what each med school’s requirements are. When in doubt, refer back to our rule of thumb, and remember that your chances will be helped the most by getting letters from people who support you wholeheartedly, who know you personally, and who can write the best letters on your behalf.
By: Ryan Kelly
When people hear the word ‘valedictorian,’ they might think of a hustling overachiever who participates in every possible organization or activity. Others might picture the opposite--the highly gifted coaster who gets by on nothing but his or her natural ability.
But the truth is, if you want to be a successful pre-med, you should find the happy medium between these two extremes.
We’ve all been there. We’re trying to get work done, but our brain is elsewhere. It’s re-hashing our troubles, revisiting embarrassing moments from our past, refusing to budge from a tense exchange with a friend. Wherever our brain is, it’s preventing us from focusing on the task at hand, and the inner monologue - that we’re stupid, that we’re unworthy, that we can’t ever get into med school - is dragging us down.
It’s times like these when we need techniques to help silence that monologue and bring our brains back to the present.
I’ll never forget a student who once asked - in all seriousness - whether she should try to study more for her MCAT by cutting her sleep from seven hours per night to only four. With three more hours per night, she reasoned, she could get some quality studying done! Wasn’t this the solution to her problems?
You think you know how to study. You're pre-med, after all, and you've managed to get good grades so far. You're pretty good at school, and you like it (or even if you don't, you're a masochist). You've followed the advice you've been given from parents and teachers over the years, and you do well through using your intelligence and sheer force of will. But unless you're also a slacker (or a cutting-edge social science researcher), your study skills are inefficient.
