<p>Can anyone elaborate on the “healthy” balance of EC’s apumic alluded to? How much volunteering/research/clubs is too much, and how much is too little? I am still a high school student, but I would like to have an accurate expectation of what a premed has to do outside of grades and test scores.</p>
<p>Whatever you do - focus on leadership and commitment. Don’t spread yourself too thin. One research project is enough if you dedicate yourself to it (paper?). If your the chair of one community service activity that will say more than being a volunteer for five. Have good experiences during the summers.</p>
<p>It sounds patronizing, but it is the truth: You need to do enough of everything to figure out whether or not medicine is for you. You may have fathers. brother, uncles and grandparents who are physicians, but you’s still better have done a thorough job of shadowing doctors yourself and being exposed to the clinical side of medicine.</p>
<p>A GPA of 3.5+ is usually seen as a minimum and a 30+ MCAT seems to be pretty “safe” if anything in this game is safe.</p>
<p>You need to pursue areas of giving back to your community and areas of life that show that you are a well rounded person.</p>
<p>You might go Greek, work a part time job, play a college sport, shadow a doctor, volunteer in a homeless shelter, volunteer in a hospital, do an organised medically related internship, have some hobbies and a life, oh and toss in some research, too. You might have done all of these and more ;)</p>
<p>BUT, don’t do those things to look good to an adcom, do them to explore and find your interests. Find opportunities that sincerely both allow you to explore the field and to determine where your interests lie.</p>
<p>Some leadership along the way would be helpful and you’d better get to know your profs so you can get some sincere and solid LORs!</p>
<p>Then when you have done all that, be sure to begin your PS in early spring, have it read by others and be ready apply to AMCAS in JUNE and begin asking for LORs in fall of the year prior to the summer you apply, then begin collecting them in spring so you will have them in time to complete your file early. Schedule yourself some serious availablility to write secondaries in July & August. Try to have a fall schedule that leave Fridays with no classes and is in general somewhat lighter than prior terms or apply during a gap year so you do not blow your senior grades when you miss classes to travel for interviews.</p>
<p>HS students come onto this board all the time asking how to do the top 10 med school track. My advice is don’t worry about that, just worry about getting in somewhere. If you set up your college life to be on track for a med school app and change your mind later, you should be able to use those same activities and grades toward any grad school or work place goal. Just be sincere and do it for the right reasons, it is too difficult to be on track every single day for 4 years of undergrad unless it is for the right reasons.</p>
<p>If you are a premed applicant you have to be aware, a moments inattention gets you a B+, too many B+/A- marks lower your GPA. You cannot afford to find yourself in two years of partying and learning how to really study. You do not have to be a keener with no fun and no life, but you have to be quite self-motivate and self-directed as well as organised from day 1.</p>
<p>Thisis the rest of your life, do it for the right reasons.</p>
<p>"My advice is don’t worry about that, just worry about getting in somewhere. " - I may add to that. I strongly agree, that is why I advised my D to get into combined program. She is happy now that she did.</p>
<p>“well, not really. We’re on the edge of the UES and East Harlem.”</p>
<p>That made me LOL, shades_children, after that apish “right in the heart of the affluence.”</p>
<p>But I do have to agree, Mt Sinai services the rich and the poor, alike. NY is so dramatic.</p>
<p>A description like juillet’s would never come from someone who had any familiarity with the area. We’d be in the heart of the UES if we were in the 70’s or 80’s. By the time you cross 96th Street, you notice the neighborhood beginning to change, and by the time you reach 100th, you’re definitely in East Harlem.</p>
<p>On a side note, if you have any correspondence with Mount Sinai, it’s better to write out “Mount” instead of abbreviated. A few other classmates and I once received a lecture from a senior professor about how “Mount” was never to be abbreviated at our Mount Sinal Hospital and that it was always to be written out in full. I guess I’ve taken his words to heart, but every now and then, on hidden-away parts of the Sinai website, I’ll fing a stray “Mt.” here or there.</p>
<p>Sinai is dope. So are all of the Manhattan schools, I must add.</p>
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<p>Because you can easily get killed while going to class at JHU. I can not think of another top medical school located in such a similar crime ridden neighborhood. Unfortunately, but true.</p>
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<p>oi vey.</p>
<p>+10</p>
<p>You can get shanked going to WashU too, which is ranked pretty “up there.”</p>
<p>If you’re a minority at Harvard you just have to deal with racist Irish Catholics.</p>
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<p>True to a certain extent. But the residents of the 'hood in East Bawlamer know a good thing when they see it, and The Hop is thier hospital and major employer. Thus, they tend to take care of it. OTOH, if you are gonna be a gun shot victim, being shot in the shadow of Hopkins Hospital…</p>
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<p>“Because you can easily get killed while going to class at JHU. I can not think of another top medical school located in such a similar crime ridden neighborhood. Unfortunately, but true.”</p>
<p>I’ve never been to JHU, but I can tell you that UTSW is in the heart of the poorest part of downtown Dallas. Not a pretty place to be.</p>
<p>Someone was killed outside of SLUSOM this week…</p>
<p>heh I don’t get it why some of you are getting deffensive, I think that if it is your dream to go to Harvard Med, for whatever reason, you should aim for it. And I also disagree with the people telling you to not think about it, to the contrary, you should plan ahead, aim for the highest scores and the future is unpredictable so ‘why the hell not’? right?</p>
<p>Although we ask many questions to which we most likely know the answer to in this forum, we are all looking for a string of hope to better our situation. The answer will always be ‘get better grades’ or ‘try to be the best’, the important thing is to stick with being your personal best.
10 years from know you will probably have graduated from med school, something you really have to think about is the path that you have taken, did it lead you to happy course or a troubled/ struggling nightmare? If you can make it all the way to and through Harvard with a feeling of not only accomplishment but enjoyment, then that is where you have to be.</p>
<p>Everyone has different tastes and different feels on what they enjoy doing, when I told a friend I wanted to go to med school, she looked at me and said ‘but you will be studying for like 10 years!’ and I only answered shortly that I didn’t mind, because in my head that what I passionately want to do.</p>
<p>So keep up your motivation and you are still a freshman you have enough time to redeem yourself. :)</p>
<p>Nice bump, bro.</p>
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<p>Sorry, but I’m just going to say this flat out: you’re wrong.
Chances are MUCH higher the OP, if in s/he were in the process of applying, would not end up going to medical school and graduating “in the next 10 years.” Be realistic here and think about it:
- At most schools a conservative estimate of the number of “pre-med” students who give up being “pre-med” between freshmen and jr/sr yr is probably 75% (so <25% remain)
- Of those that remain and take the MCAT, only about 62% end up applying (about 1/3 drop out at this point)
- 58% of students who apply never attend med school (only about 42% of applicants get in)</p>
<p>What does this mean? Well, if the OP is a freshmen his/her chances of “graduating med school 10 years from now” are less than 6.5%! Furthermore, even if the OP is among those who make it all the way to jr/sr yr and apply (i.e., the OP is not weeded out during college), the OP’s chances remain at no better than 26%! If you want to call that “probable,” fine, but while encouragement is nice, the OP came here for advice. You don’t go asking strangers for encouragement. You get encouragement from your mom. You get an authentic, no strings attached answer on a forum like this as people don’t feel bad giving you a reality check. The OP needed a serious reality check, plain and simple.</p>
<p>"Nice bump, bro. "
Lol! I didn’t even notice the date of the last post :P</p>
<p>Sorry apumic, I only read your post now.
I agree with what you are saying, “You don’t go asking strangers for encouragement. You get encouragement from your mom.”, but I wasn’t encouraging him into a delusion, it is what I personally think about, I think he still stands a chance at going to harvard med if he increases his chances (grades). And statistics don’t mean anything at all, no one in this thread knows the OP personally to tell him anything. It is cool that you point out statistics, but no one knows how driven he can be and how motivated he is towards getting into med school. Personally, I find that planning ahead is always good to know where you want to go/be. Also what are statistics worth if there is still a chance that he might graduate pre-med and then go all the way through med school. What drives people to success is not necessarily luck, it’s like an organ, with many tissues working together, that is the only way that he might reach success in an honest matter.</p>
<p>^That’s the thing. We don’t know the OP, so have to speak from a perspective of we don’t know him/her. Stats are very valuable regardless of whether or not we know the OP, because what those stats tell the OP is where s/he needs to be to even get into a medical school – the top 6% of all premeds at his/her school (in other words, a 3.8 won’t cut it for “Hahhhvahd” and neither will a 32-33 MCAT…unless you can pull those off AND succeed in achieving a host of other things simultaneously). If the OP is more concerned with prestige than anything else as is indicated by the first few posts (comments like “if I don’t get into Harvard, I’ll got Columbia” are absolutely ridiculous), medicine is almost certainly the wrong profession for him/her.</p>
<p>(It should also be noted that the OP said he/she has been getting Bs freshmen year… that tells me this person probably lacks the drive and focus necessary to achieve such a difficult and largely luck + achievement-based goal.)</p>
<p>I have to side with apumic, one should not need to focus solely on one medical school to be at their best. The fact of the matter is that most people who get into medical school ANYWHERE were doing their best. Few trip and fall into medical school. Moreover, I doubt most of the kids who GO to HMS were of the “Harvard or bust” mentality. Those kind of people tend to burn out or just get screened out. Believe it or not, the people that go to Harvard and other top medical schools got their by focusing on their passions not focusing on getting into a top medical school. Those are the kind of people they recruit, academically talented people with passions and talents within and without of medicine. There is not a way to plan out a four year plan to be passionate enough to get HMS’s attention. There are not specific check boxes on a super secret HMS admissions form that you should be striving to fill (beyond the general requirements of classes, clinical experience, etc).</p>