<p>Hey guys. I'm currently finishing up my freshman year of undergrad as a tentative pre-med. Because I came into college with a lot of credit hours (40+ credits from AP), I realized that I can comfortably fit all of the classes I need to take - med school prereqs, distribution, major and minor reqs - in just the next two years. I'm pretty set on graduating a year early now, seeing as it would save a lot of money with little extra work.</p>
<p>I know that med schools prefer more mature applicants, and I honestly don't think that my application will be at its strongest after just 3 years of undergrad. And, as silly as it sounds, I don't want to miss out on my fourth year of the "college experience"- I just don't want to pay for it if I don't have to. For these reasons, I think that I want to graduate in 3 years and then take a gap year to keep living in my college town while working/volunteering/doing research/studying for MCAT/etc.</p>
<p>My issue is that I'm a little confused on the timeline for how med school applications work. I would want my gap year activities on my application, seeing as that's probably when I'll get most of my experience and develop myself as a person. And, ideally, I could use this gap year to work on med school apps and have time to study for the MCAT (maybe to take in the January of my gap year?). But, if I want to use my gap year experience on apps, and med school applications open in the early summer, wouldn't that mean that I couldn't apply for med school until the end of my gap year? And since I would be interviewing at places and not get acceptances until that next fall, wouldn't that mean that I would have to take -another- gap year? So, two gap years?</p>
<p>I guess the alternative here would be to apply for med school at the end of my junior (last) year of undergrad, and then do interviews during the fall of my gap year, but then my application would be pretty weak. Anyway, I just need some guidance about how I should time this all out- any and all advice is welcome! Thanks!</p>
Yep. Applying to medical school takes a full year. Let’s use this upcoming cycle as an example. People who are submitting their application in summer 2014 are doing so to enter medical school in fall 2015. They will submit their AMCAS in summer 2014, submit their secondaries later in the summer, interview in august2014-march2015 as well as get accepted in that window, commit to a school in may 2015, and actually start med school in august 2015.</p>
<p>If you want your gap year stuff to actually be on the application (rather than just “proposed” stuff - which god only knows how that’s really evaluated) then you would have to spend 2 years between college and med school so that you could apply the summer after your 1st gap year. Medical students who came straight from college actually applied after their junior year and basically don’t get to use much - if any - of their senior year accomplishments.</p>
<p>You should check with your school’s pre med advisor on this, but are your AP credits listed on your transcript as credit for specific courses? A lot of medical schools don’t accept true AP credits. If you search around the forum there’s a nice PDF someone posted from Rice I believe that summarizes all the school’s policies, but it’s safe to say that if you don’t have “credit for Bio101” on your transcript rather than “AP Credit” or “Unassigned Credit” you might not be able to fulfill the pre med pre reqs and graduate in 3 years anyway.</p>
<p>You seem to understand the timeline. It’s your choice if you want to take 1 or 2 gap years. The “traditional” path also relies on only the first three years in college to build a resume. So taking a single gap year vs. your senior year changes nothing. I also had many AP credits (50+) and used every one which allowed me to take advanced/graduate courses as an undergrad and I will graduate with over 180 semester hours of credit. But if $ is a concern, then taking time off to work is certainly understandable.
Good luck. </p>
<p>@i<em>wanna</em>be_Brown- I guess I didn’t realize that applying to medical school would be similar to applying to college during HS. So, are parts of med school applications just things like “Will continue research, will volunteer” etc? I had this really ideal vision of having this whole year to work on MCAT prep/applications, but I guess I’ll have to reconsider if I don’t want to take two years off. As for the AP credit, I more meant that credit gave me over 30% of the credits that I need to graduate college (I’ll technically only need 43 more credits after this year), so that I’ll have enough credits to graduate. What my counselor told me with AP was that if I do have AP credit for a pre-req, a lot of colleges will acknowledge it as long as I have upper-level coursework in that area? Is this true/legit? But yeah, if I stay on the track I planned out, I <em>should</em> have it all done in 3 years. </p>
<p>@plumazul- Wow, it’s cool that you were able to get your money’s worth and take all those classes! It’s not so much that I need to take time off to work, but more that saving a year’s worth of tuition would save a lot of money, seeing as I’m out of state as an expensive university. I just don’t want to do another year if I’d be taking classes that I don’t actually <em>need</em> for anything. </p>
<p>At this point, I guess I’m considering just applying for med school after my junior year just like everybody else. Is this also when I would apply for grad school, then? (am considering applying for PhD programs in my field as a backup?)</p>