<p>I lurk on this board quite a bit to learn what I can about the whole pre-med and medical school application process. My son is starting his sophomore year majoring in engineering. He passionately wants to become a doctor but I wonder if he will be able to get into medical school.</p>
<p>I don't doubt for a minute that he could get in but I'm afraid he won't. He's very smart - he has a 4.0 after his freshman year and has taken both semesters of Chem, Calc II and Calc III, the first semester of Physics, and the first semester of Bio. This year he will take both semesters of Orgo, and the second semester of Physics. The way his engineering classes line up he won't be able to take the second semester of Bio until his junior year. </p>
<p>I would guess that he will do reasonably well on the MCATs - he has always tested extremely well (probably due in part to the fact that he has no text anxiety at all). He did amazing on the SATs with no prep at all. </p>
<p>So what is the concern? His personality does not fit at all with what seems to be the typical med student. If he were any more laid back he'd be in a coma. He does not stress about anything and doesn't usually feel much of a sense of urgency. While I think he will have the grades and the scores that he'll need, I don't know that he will have the rest of the package. In spite of my "helpful" suggestions, he didn't really get involved in much his freshman year (other than playing intramural sports and having a lot of fun with his friends) that would make him stand out from any other candidate. He is planning to do a volunteer medical internship in Thailand for five weeks next summer so that should get some good clinical experience. His friend who was in the program this summer got great hands-on experience assisting in surgeries (standards are much more lax there). He is also lined up to participate in biomedical research that starts in January. Beyond this, I don't think he has much planned. While both of these will be good, I doubt it is enough.</p>
<p>In general he is happy to settle for "good enough" so I think he'll be content if he gets into our state medical school and doesn't have any delusions about aiming for a top medical school. But I have been following curm's thread about this years applicants with great interest as well as most of the other threads on this board and I have surfed on SDN as well. I don't know what - if anything - I can do to make him understand that it's much more difficult to get in than he seems to think and that he needs to be working harder to make himself a more competitive applicant.</p>
<p>I must confess that sometimes I envy his relaxed approach about life. He is able to enjoy life more and worries much less - and in general he somehow always manages to get things done. </p>
<p>Do you think there is anything I can or should do? His university seems to have pretty good advising, so hopefully he will listen to their suggestions and take it to heart. I am wondering if any of you have experience with knowing somebody with this type of personality who was able to get into medical school and successfully become a doctor.</p>
<p>He sounds like he’s doing just fine. Balance is the key. As parents we’d like to have the accelerator (you) and brake (me) pedals every now and then…but really we don’t. Above our pay grade. Keep it to helpful nudges. Gathering info. </p>
<p>My guess is that he’ll be A-OK. (He’s listening. He’s just not admitting it to you.)</p>
<p>Most premeds are high-talent, high-motor. Premeds can live with a slightly-above-average-motor if their talent level is really that astounding.</p>
<p>From what you’ve told us, it sounds like it might well be enough: the clinical experience, the research, etc. But that’s just on paper.</p>
<p>1.) Will he be disciplined enough to study for the MCAT? I have no doubt he could get a fine score, but he’s going to want to do better than that in light of light EC’s.
2.) Is he getting to know his professors? He’ll need to rely on them for letters of recommendation.
3.) Will you be able to convince him to send in his application, and his secondary applications, online? Will he be convinced of their importance and willing to be a perfectionist about them?
4.) Will he convey an active personality during interviews? Energetic, enthusiastic, well-reasoned, etc.? I don’t know anybody quite like your son who has applied to, much less made it into medical school* – but I know several people who were very proactive about checking the boxes they needed but couldn’t convey any passion for the field. As a general rule, they did astonishingly poorly during the admissions process.</p>
<p>(*Well, maybe one, who has somehow managed to do very well despite my utter bafflement. But that’s the only one!)</p>
<p>BDM, could you please elaborate a little bit on what you meant by “high-motor”? Do you mean “high energy” on many fronts, like a person who tends to do more than a typical student would do in both depth and breadth? For example, s/he may take more classes than necessary, do more research or are very active in a couple of clubs.</p>
<p>Thanks. It apperars to me that for some premeds, conveying an active personality as mentioned in your item 4) may be the most challenging one. DS once mentioned that in freshman year, he needs to (kind of) force himself to talk in a seminar class (e.g., an English class). Some students there are good at talking about anything even when they really do very little assigned reading beforehand. However, he said he improved a lot in this area after he had been active in a club for two years, meaning that he no longer feels uncomfortable when he needs to have a conversation with persons who he is not familiar with. It is easy to talk to some of your friends. It is another story when you need to talk to a stranger.</p>
<p>Having been through many pre-med classes, DS once made a comment like this: The ego of a typical premed student is mostly based on how he performs on written tests, as s/he would feel depressed when he does not get a grade perceived as good by himself. If what he said has some (sad) truth in it, it is not a good training ground for boosting an active personality :)</p>
<p>mmmcdowe: Why do you say Yale is a school where type A students try to be type B? I am just curious. I only heard about a joke: “one in four, maybe more” about Yale. (In case this is not clear, it is about the fact that many gay students are attracted to that school. It is stereotype, of course. However, students there may be more liberal on this topic.)</p>
<p>Oops… I now understand that you likely refer to the Medical School there rather than Yale College, as OP is already a college student. If this is the case, you probably refer to the fact that it is a pass/no-pass medial school. Am I right?</p>
<p>Thats just a tagline of theirs that I heard a lot when I was reading about them and interviewed there. They were pretty laid back, but I only hung out with a small group of them. The rest might have been studying. :D</p>
<p>Weird, many doctors I have met were pretty laid back people. Intelligent, hard-working, and caring, but relaxed and calm. Do med school interviewers expect interviewees to be brimming with energy and hopping out of their seat with enthusiasm?</p>
<p>I’ll answer that with a “yes,” but I’m going to qualify it significantly.</p>
<p>First, enthusiasm and passion don’t always manifest themselves via physical activity. One of my medical school classmates actually calms down and speaks more slowly when he gets excited, and it’s relatively common behavior. So “brimming with energy” and “hopping out of their seat” aren’t necessary, but enthusiasm is.</p>
<p>You can contrast recent political candidates. Bush was what I call a kinetic speaker – he does much better when he’s moving. (Unfortunately for him, he always seemed to forget this as soon as election season ended.) By contrast, Obama is more in the mold of the friend I was talking about – he seems more intense when talking more slowly and demonstrating less movement.</p>
<p>Second, you don’t have to be a particularly passionate or enthusiastic person overall, but you should at least have enough passion and enthusiasm to key up for big moments – like a medical school interview, or like the MCAT.</p>
<p>I agree with BDM. You could even go even further and say, no, you don’t need to be hopping up and down in your interview. However, if a question comes up about, say, the four years you spent tutoring in the inner city, the adcom member is going to expect some sort of enthusiasm and passion. This doesn’t have to be you waving your arms and hooting and hollering. As BDM said, some people’s passionate moments are their stillest.</p>
<p>Ah, that’s a good way to put it. Thanks for the elaboration. I don’t like being phony, but I see that a “yeah, whatever” approach to an interview won’t get you anywhere.</p>
<p>I would guess that the passion and enthusiasm have to be medicine related.</p>
<p>This is what I am still somewhat concerned about DS. He may have enough passion and enthusiasm, but the passion is not necessarily directly related to medicine.</p>
<p>At one of his interviews during his college admission cycle, he ended up talking to the interviewer for more than 3 hours just because both of them happened to be enthusiastic about the same topic and they enjoyed their conversation so much that they could not stop. When he is with somebody who shares the same interest, they could keep going on and on for a long time.</p>
<p>He has a large impulse from time to time but not necessarily have sustaining power all the time.</p>
<p>I would say that, yes, you need to have passion and enthusiasm when it comes to medicine. However, some of the things that you talk about in the interviews don’t have to be directly related to medicine, but you should still be passionate and enthusiastic about them (assuming you weren’t trying to pad your resume). You should also be able to explain how these thing can indirectly relate to medicine. For example, maybe it was some character trait that you gained from the activity that you can apply while in medicine. Perhaps it will help you relate better to patients or staff, or help you lead better. Maybe it helped you work quickly and efficiently under fire, and you are certain that this will help you do the same in tense medical situations. Maybe it helped you overcome an obstacle in your life and that overcoming will help you some how, or the obstacle would have hurt you. </p>
<p>I, for one, was petrified of caving. I had no problem rock climbing and stuff, but the act of lowering myself down a rope caused me to freeze up the first time I did it. Over time, I learned to control my fear and perform despite of it (it still freaks me out until I’m in the groove, but I no longer let my fear control me). Being able to supress one’s fears and anxieties is something that I was then able to apply to medicine.</p>
<p>Thanks for the responses. It helps to get a sense of perspective by listening to others’ thoughts.</p>
<p>I know S will take an MCAT prep course and he will study some. Probably not as much as some, but a reasonable amount. Taking practice exams should help him get a sense of how much study he needs to do. This is one area where his university’s advising will help.</p>
<p>He is in the honors program and has many classes that are small. He seems to be getting to know a few of his professors much better than I ever knew mine. Hopefully this will translate into good LOR.</p>
<p>He has always been pretty independent. He does things on his own timeline, not mine, but he gets things done. Very shortly after he started his freshman year, we moved to China (husband and I both have expat assignments here for a couple years). He has had to fend for himself much more than the typical college student and I think that experience is helping him get a better sense of deadlines. I’m sure I will have to follow up with him (probably long distance) to see where he stands on getting applications and secondaries in quickly, but he’ll get it done. He won’t be a perfectionist about it, though.</p>
<p>I do think he can come across well in interviews. He will not engage in activities to check a box. He only does what he’s interested in but when he commits, he commits fully (if that makes sense). He won’t be able to use all 15 lines (or whatever it is) of activities on the application, but I would guess that whatever he does list he will be able to talk about passionately. His university seems to offer a lot of opportunities for mock interviews and he has said that he would want to take advantage of that.</p>
<p>I’ll continue to encourage and try not to nag too much, but this is really up to him. </p>
<p>Curmudgeon - thanks for your comments. I suspect you are correct. The first kid (daughter) was one that I definitely needed to apply the brake pedal with. It makes it that much harder with the second kid when he really needs an accelerator. Great analogy!</p>
<p>I wouldn’t sweat using all 15 lines. 10 is plenty. If you can get your point across and save the adcom some useless reading about that one time that you shook a police mans hand and it was kinda an award, they will appreciate it.</p>
<p>At the time of applications, if your DS has a combination of superlative GPA and MCAT scores and only 2 lines filled out for ECs, I would sincerely hope he gets in despite the lightweight ECs.</p>
<p>If I am ever rushed to a Medical Center due to a crisis, I sure hope that a Medic who knows his field of Science thoroughly (despite being a Type B personality) takes care of me rather than someone who had ‘scraped-through Science GPA’ with innumerable lines filled out in the AMCAS with numerous ECs.</p>
<p>This is probably way too late to help you son or anyone on this thread, but that doesn’t really matter. I’ve been in medical school for around 7 months, and was actually enrolled in law school, had a job lined up at a giant firm, and planned to work in intellectual property law and move into corporate leadership later in life…</p>
<p>I dropped out of law school after three days because I thought surgery would be FUN. I shadowed doctors and watched online surgeries. I read about medical research and worked at a hospital. I did all these things because I wanted to make sure medicine would be FUN, challenging, enthralling, etc. If he thinks medicine will be FUN then tell him to make a really high score on the MCAT. The MCAT is really, really hard, and by scoring well, he’ll show his genuine interest without having to be amped up in the interview. If he wants to apply to medical school because it is “medical school,” then he’ll have a tough time getting in and a tough time in life. But, if he is himself, and if he applies to medical school because he knows what doctors do and he geniunely thinks it will make his life more like a children’s adventure novella, then he will do just fine. All you need to do is tell him to explore the profession… take a year off, work in a doctor’s office, a hospital, or even a restaurant. Use the time to find out if he really, truly wants to follow this path. It’s a tough road for a few years, mainly because we use the same curriculum length, four years, to cover 100 times the material they covered a century ago. Seriously. Human brains, however, have not gotten 100 times more powerful. So it’s really tough, especially for someone who treasures their personality like your son. What I mean is that using your brain to construct and maintain a personality (something only human brains are capable of) and acquiring as much knowledge as we acquire, is very stressful on the brain. </p>
<p>If he knows that in the end he will be doing something fun, then he’ll put up with all the ******** along the way. So, just make sure he really wants to do it. If he does, then he’ll do what he needs to to get here. </p>
<p>I didn’t read any of the other posts, but how about considering biomedical engineering? There are other ways to help people in the medical field besides becoming a doctor. And he does participate in a lot of medical research.</p>
Balance is the key. As parents we’d like to have the accelerator (you) and brake (me) pedals every now and then…but really we don’t. Above our pay grade. Keep it to helpful nudges. Gathering info. </p>