College extracurriculars

Pre-Med & Medical School Pre-Med Topics
1

<p>What kinds of and how many ecs do you think are important for med school? My plan:
-EMT
-volunteer through tutoring or some other way
-possibly starting a club
-get a job (does this look good as an ec? or do they not care?) </p>

<p>My biggest question is whether or not you think I should join the fencing team as well. It is a significant time commitment for around 3/4 of the school year (with around 5 hours of practice per week and then daylong meets for many weekends). I think i'd have decent grades but not stellar if I did this. I did fencing in high school and had a 96.25 gpa in case that helps. I'm assuming college will be an order of magnitude harder and the fencing season is longer, so I'm conflicted. How good do sports look in the eyes of med school admissions? </p>

<p>A higher priority than all of these for me will be to do research throughout the year and over the summers.</p>

2

<p>reposted from your other thread with the same question</p>

<p>EMT— is a good EC only if you actually work as an EMT. EMT credentials are a dime a dozen among pre-meds and not in and of themselves impressive to adcoms. Working as EMT does not absolve you from needing physician shadowing and additional clinical volunteering in other settings.</p>

<p>volunteer— volunteering is very important. You’ll need both clinical (patient contact) and non-clinical/community service volunteering. Adcoms are interested in seeing more than check-box types of volunteering. This means long term and personally meaningful.</p>

<p>starting a club– this is a ‘it depends’ kind of thing. It depends whether this is an active, viable, on-going-after-you-leave club or not. The latter is pretty obviously resume padding. There are plenty of other ways to demonstrate leadership.</p>

<p>jobs– jobs are useful because they teach you skills you’ll need as physician (time management, teamwork, how to deal with superiors and peers, interpersonal communications, etc). Having worked as an employee also may make you better able to relate to your future patients. Jobs come in under the non-madatory but quite useful heading.</p>

<p>research–unless you’re aiming at a MD/PhD or for a top research oriented medical school, research is often over-valued by pre meds. It’s important, but it’s not as important as pre meds often think it is. (IIRC, about 12-15% of med school matriculants have little or no research experience.) Great research won’t make up for sub-par grades, MCAT or weak ECs.</p>

<p>athletics– are a valuable EC and teach you many of same things that employment does (teamwork, time management, etc) There’s med student who posts here who was a varsity fencer in college. Maybe he’ll pop in and offer you his insights about the value of team sports for pre-meds.</p>

<p>P.S. you left physician shadowing off your list.</p>

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</p>

<p>En garde…pret…allez:</p>

<p>I saw from your other thread you will be at JHU. I’m surprised they practice only 5 hours/week, at Brown we practiced 10/week Sep-March and I always thought we were on the low side. Our competitive season was Nov-March with competitions literally every weekend from jan-march. I believe on my AMCAS I listed fencing as a 35hour/week activity (now you list total hours I believe).</p>

<p>My first question is are you a guy or a girl and were you a recruit? In other words, how realistic is it that you can actually participate since I believe JHU is D1 for fencing (they waived my application fee with a little note about my athlete status when I applied which I think wouldn’t be allowed at a D3 program) and thus they probably have a limit to the number of guys that can be on the team and so if your high school fencing experience is not competitive (i.e. are you rated?), you might not be able to make the team anyway. If you’re a girl, schools are much more willing to retain girls on the roster since it helps with title IX compliance (for example my team has no limit to the number of girls who can be on the roster but there is a limit for guys).</p>

<p>Second, with regard to its impact on med schools it’s certainly not going to make up for poor grades or MCAT, but I will say that on the MD/PhD trail, it was a very common discussion point on my interviews, and I know multiple schools put extra weight in athletics compared to many other ECs given that they are much better demonstrations of commitment and often require much more time and energy (I typically did minimal to no work on competition weekends because you’re completely wiped at the end and I personally wasn’t good at doing work on busses). The other EC that gets this kind of weight is serious musicians (e.g. people playing in some school sponsored group - not the people occasionally busting out their guitar on the quad)</p>

<p>My medical school class has two other former ivy league fencers in addition to me (and a guy from the Brown track team and definitely a few club athletes), and in my MD/PhD class, there is another club fencer and a guy who played competitive rugby in college as well.</p>

<p>I’ve also met a couple former fencer attendings at the hospital (they always stop me if I’m wearing any of my Brown Fencing stuff) and some people swear that fencers make better surgeons but that certainly wouldn’t apply to me because my blade work was actually (relatively speaking) very poor.</p>

<p>I really enjoyed being on a varsity team and while I entertained quitting at one point, I decided against it and instead just quit on my goal of being all conference since that would have required putting in a lot more than the team minimum 35 hours/week and I simply couldn’t afford that. I’m glad I didn’t quit, athletics is an amazing outlet and while you can try and engage in a bunch of intramurals, it’s simply not the same as the formal D1 atmosphere. Also, with fencing in particular, the combative mano a mano nature of it was always a thrill for me in a way that true team sports like football or soccer couldn’t capture.</p>

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<p>i<em>wanna</em>be_Brown and Way Out West Mom, thanks so much! </p>

<p>I may be misunderstanding the info I had about JHU, and it may in fact be more than 5 hours, but that’s what I think. </p>

<p>I’m a girl and have a USFA E ranking. All sports at Hopkins except Lacrosse are Div 3, so fencing is Div 3. I’m not 100% sure if I could get onto the team or not, but I heard that the girl’s team is “always looking” for new fencers. If I worked hard at it for the rest of senior year, I think it’s feasible that I might get a D rating. </p>

<p>So about the time commitment… You know how there are people who can just read information once, walk into the test, and get an A? And then there are people who read the book 5 times and are lucky to get a B? I’m in between, but probably at the higher end of in between…If I read it a couple of times and do practice problems, I’ll get an A. From what I understand of your post, fencing looks good as long as you’re not the type that needs hours upon hours to study and your GPA therefore suffers? </p>

<p>I’m looking to be an MD/PhD… a couple of people from your class do athletics, so what did the rest do that made them stand out? Were they involved in some sort of breakthrough research? Because I would love to be, but I don’t know if I can do anything to guarantee that…research is unknown and all that. </p>

<p>Haha I don’t think I want to be a surgeon, but if I end up being one, I’ll keep that in mind! </p>

<p>So if it’s 35 hours per week, how do you do research as well? Do you limit yourself to over the summer? If so, do you feel that doing over the summer and during the year research is more beneficial than just over the summer? </p>

<p>And yes, I’ve always loved that fencing is one on one and that you’re always the one doing things during a bout instead of watching teammates.</p>

5

<p>As a girl I would be surprised if you couldn’t be on the roster although I don’t know if JHU limits the number of people who can travel to meets.</p>

<p>Research:
I didn’t start research until summer after sophomore year, then only again summer after junior year then all through senior year and my glide year.</p>

<p>Work/Balance:
In addition to fencing I was also in a fraternity (AMCAS listed at 25 hours/week) so as you can see, time was tight. As I went through college I simply got better at stuff. I typically did minimal to no work most weeks except for the one leading up to a major assignment. In the ivy league regardless of sport (and I imagine basically all fencing teams follow this too), there can’t be any competitions during reading period or finals. In the fall, the season was light enough that it didn’t really impact me at all. The beginning of spring semester was always a struggle because in addition to fencing, spring was rush and so I would have events and meetings almost every night of the week. Since the season ends by the end of march (beginning of march if you don’t go to regionals or nationals), finals and stuff in the spring wasn’t an issue.</p>

<p>Honestly one of the main things you learn in college is how to do work more effectively. 3-5 page papers used to agonize me in high school and by the end of college I could research and write a 15-20 pager in a few days. The better fencers didn’t do much outside of fencing and school whereas those of us on the lower ends of the roster were often more involved in other things.</p>

<p>My MD/PhD classmates:
All MD/PhDs are heavily involved in research, but definitely not all of it is groundbreaking. I would venture most of it isn’t. The MD/PhD admissions evaluates people and their involvement in research, not the data they produce. It’s at my level and beyond where the data matters more.</p>

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<p>Like I said on the other post, lots of tests this week; sorry for taking so long!
Research:
You started as a sophomore and got into an MD/PhD? Maybe it’s my ineffable naivete, but that makes me feel much better about waiting a semester to start research. Thanks! </p>

<p>Work/life:
I actually ran into a Hopkins student who went to my school and she told me that I’d probably be able to be on the fencing team but not a starter (no surprise there haha). That made me remember how (as bad as it sounds…) irritating it was to not be a starter on my fencing team. Like being dragged around to meets that I’d not even fence in. Hopkins only has around 6 or 7 meets a year though and they’re spread over more months than high school, so it wouldn’t be as bad. But the thought of being in JV again makes me wonder if it’s worth it…
It’s good to be part of that tightly-knit kind of a group, so I think that’d be nice. And it sounds like the timing of studying vs. fencing works out most of the time and you have enough time to study…and be in a fraternity :O. When you say you did minimal to no work, do you feel like you really understood the course or were you just getting the grades? I mean obviously you knew a lot in great depth because you did amazing research, but do you feel like you would have gotten more out of college if you’d studied more? Or was class time enough?
And yeah that’s good that the lower fencers were given enough time to be in other things…I definitely want to be. </p>

<p>MD/PhD expectations:
So maybe I’m to inexperienced to be asking this, but how do they evaluate “involvement”? Like whether you were doing low level tech/repetitive/clerical stuff vs. if you made your own independent project? And with the data thing…you’re basically saying that if you plan an amazing experiment but it doesn’t produce very unexpected or helpful results, it’s ok? </p>

<p>Thanks so much for letting me barrage you with questions! It’s not often I find someone with so many interests in common with mine…and definitely not someone who is where I want to be in 5 years so I can hear their success story!</p>

7

<p>Tech vs independent.</p>

<p>That will be reflected several ways:</p>

<p>–senior thesis (which is by definition an independent project)</p>

<p>–letter of recommendation from your PI who will detail your lab responsibilities</p>

<p>–your description of your research/research responsibilities on your AMCAS application</p>

<p>-- your authorship position on any papers published (But this varies wildly by PI, by research field [different disciplines have different conventions about who gets listed and the order], by university so authorship order isn’t always a good indicator of level of involvement unless you’re the first author)</p>

<p>If you apply MD/PhD, your research involvement will be something you talk about in detail at every interview. It doesn’t take an experienced scientist long to determine whether you had any significant involvement or not. </p>

<p>Even at straight MD interviews, you may be asked to discuss your research.</p>

<p>As for the data thing–it happens. Science isn’t straight-forward. There are lots of blind alleys and dead ends. There’s also getting scooped. (Someone else publishes results very similar to yours first.) Or getting data that really isn’t significant (or publishable.) It happens all the time. I’ve lived with a research scientist for 30+ years and I work in basic research environment so I’ve seen it all close up.</p>

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<p>“My plan:
-EMT
-volunteer through tutoring or some other way
-possibly starting a club
-get a job (does this look good as an ec? or do they not care?)”</p>

<p>I suggest considering:
-Medically related volunteering
-Physician shadowing
-Job is good, most work while in UG
-Med. Research internship
-Pursuing any of your personal interest(s) outside of medicine (if you have time). You will not have this opportunity later.</p>

<p>Outside of ECs, the important skills that my D. has develped in UG and used to her great advantage at Med. School were:
-Spanish (and other Foreign language)
-great communication skills (including writing, ability to present, ability to connect to wide range of people with various backgrounds, interests, sets of mind)</p>

<p>My D. has tried to pursue her sport. She was on club team during Freshman year. However, her other interests pushed her sport out of her life. She was an accomplished team member from 5 y o thru graduating from HS. She still holds about 15 team records. So, he sport has been a significant part of her life that required about 3 hours of her day. However, she decided to be in sorority. This eneded up a significant time commitment as well as a huge positive experience resulted in personal growth, and further developing of gommunication and other leadership skills.<br>
What you participate in UG is a very personal question. You have to decide for yourself. I say that sport is great, but if something else comes along that you might get interested, you should be flexible and open minded to adjust to your new interests.</p>

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<p>Did not readi close before. I do not believe that you can estimate average hours. Some classes wil be significantly harder for you personally than others. One striking example in my D’s experience is Gen. Chem. vs Orgo. She never had anything below A+ (over 100% with the extra credits) in Gen. Chem. and was hired on a spot by prof to be an SI in this class - the greatest job on campus, with fringe benefits of not beeing in any need to study Gen. Chem portion for MCAT. She has accomplished that with very littel effort. OK, Orgo - just one test / exam required about 30 hrs of prep. D. would end up dropping working on other classes and going over Orgo material in her head while walking from class to class. The point is that you cannot estimate, because as she discovered talking to others, Orgo was easier for them than Gen. Chem.<br>
The other point, if you know yourself weel enough and can predict which class will be hard and which one will be ease for your personally, then the goal is not have no more than 2 very hard classes per semester with the blalnce of easier classes.<br>
Again, third point is to load heavily in the first 2 years. Your Junior / Senior year have to be much lighter. Junior year is an MCAT preparation time and Senior year is time for Med. School interviews. You also need great flexibility in Senior year because Med. Schools are changing requirements and one of D’s school added significant new requirements AFTER D. has applied. She had to completely change her first semester registration and drop one of her minors being 2 classes short of completion. You can do it only if the requirements and most of your graduation requirements are completed.</p>

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<p>Just as it excites you to be able to ask these questions, it excites me to be able to answer them.</p>

<p>WOWMom summed it up perfectly with regard to involved vs. trained monkey. It’s very easy to tell once you’ve been involved in research for a bit. Even I could tell when I was interviewing replacements for myself.</p>

<p>I would not have gotten more out of college if I studied more. Honestly, I don’t think I would have done more work if I didn’t have so much on my plate and I don’t think I would have found med school more stressful if I had less on my plate in UG. I learned alot in college.</p>

<p>With regard to fencing, you should find out if the whole squad actually travels, even though they may carry 6-7 girls per weapon on the roster, they may only travel with 5 per weapon. I agree with you about being that low down on the roster. When we had an unusually strong recruiting year in my weapon that bumped me from the clear #3 spot to 5/6, i switched to our weakest weapon so that I could at least be 3/4 and start with good frequency.</p>

<p>If your goal is to go straight from UG to MD/PhD, I would recommend starting research the summer after freshman year and continuing through sophomore year etc.</p>

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<p>Thanks! So it sounds like nothing I do goes unnoticed if I don’t let it. </p>

<p>Clinical shadowing…how much do they usually expect? Many of my family members overseas work at a hospital and I’ve shadowed there before, so I’m sure I could again. Plus it’d be impressive because I’d get diversity points for learning about medicine abroad. If I took a few weeks during winter break (or summer, if I have no internships/research one year) and shadowed there, would it be enough? Is there a particular number of hours they’re expecting? </p>

<p>Yup, I’m taking Spanish and I plan to continue in college since I know it’s invaluable for the medical profession. </p>

<p>Thanks for the advice on loading heavily freshman/sophomore year. I definitely will. </p>

<p>i<em>wanna</em>be_Brown, I know what you mean. When it’s not fencing season, I pretty much hang around on the Internet during the time I’d be at practice anyway. I’ll check if I have to travel or not. And WHAT you fenced as a starter for multiple weapons? Amazing :open_mouth: </p>

<p>So I should wait a whole year before research? Hm ok. I guess I’ll see how my grades are semester 1 and if I’m struggling too much I’ll focus on school for semester 2.</p>

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<p>RE: shadowing. The bulk of your shadowing should be done in US healthcare settings, not overseas. You will be practicing in the US so you need to demonstrate familiarity with a physician’s life/responsibilities/scope of practice in US healthcare setting. </p>

<p>Amount of shadowing you’ll do will depend on how much you’re gaining from the experience. I know that kristin (a formerly frequent poster who’s now a MS3) spent 100+ shadowing; OTOH, one of my kiddos had only about ~30 hours.</p>

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<p>Hmm ok I’ll stick with US then. What’s an MS3?
So the amount of shadowing is however long it takes you to get comfortable?</p>

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<p>MS3 = 3rd year medical student.</p>

<p>MS0 = incoming med student who hasn’t started classes yet.</p>

<p>I have a MS3 and MS0.</p>

<p>~~~ </p>

<p>Shadowing is however long it takes until you feel you’ve seen/done enough to understand thoroughly what the life/scope of practice of a physician is like. </p>

<p>Kristin developed an excellent working relationship with the physician she shadowed and ended up being taken into his clinical research group so some of those 100 hours may have included some of her clinical experiences with him. </p>

<p>My kiddo with 30 hours of shadowing had 2000+ hours of patient procedure clinical experiences under the oversight of a physician. She didn’t count working with that physician in her shadowing. Her 30 hours were shadowing other specialties to see how they differed/were similar to the specialty she worked with extensively.</p>

<p>On your AMCAS, you have to choose to label each experience as only 1 category. Sometime sit’s hard to decide what to label something.</p>

15

<p>I recommend waiting a full year because if you do something like fencing, fall and spring semester will be very different for you and each one will require a transition.</p>

<p>And I only started shadowing during my glide year. I’d def recommend starting earlier than I did.</p>

<p>I never got to be a full starter for foil. I was the 4 my sophomore year and the 2 graduated so I would have moved up but then 3 new foilists came and we had no </p>

16

<p>“patient procedure clinical experiences under the oversight of a physician”…sounds almost like interning…what is it? is it something a lot of UGs do?</p>

<p>and hm about the fencing yeah I guess that makes sense. I’ll have enough to worry about enough without research the first year too. </p>

<p>And I think I’ll go for it. I don’t want to regret not pursuing a sport I’ve done for 7 years.</p>

17

<p>I don’t how uncommon it is for undergrads to run non-invasive procedures. I suppose it depends on the lab. In undergrad she worked largely with fMRI. </p>

<p>If you’re interested in what kind of stuff she did in her undergrad and post-grad lab–PM me. I’d rather not go into details about her research to preserve her privacy.</p>

18

<p>Alright, thanks!</p>