<p>In the end, you’re the one who gets to make up your schedule, and your advisor should be able to offer lots of valuable input. If not, find a new advisor.</p>
<p>What you’ll find, when it comes time to apply, is that there is a TON more to your application than your GPA and your MCAT score. Those numbers might open doors for you, but whether you get interviews and eventually acceptances seems to be based a lot off of the other things you’ve done. They usually fall into 4 categories: research, volunteering, medical stuff, leadership. If you can be decently strong in most of those areas, plus have good stats, you should be set for an acceptance somewhere. </p>
<p>So you’ve done lots of stuff as an assistant scout master and are a former eagle scout. Clearly that shows dedication, leadership, and service. Those are all awesome–what a great start! Have you made it a point to continue developing those things in college? If you did them in high school and plan to use them just to pad your med school resume, be careful. It’s dangerous to rely on previous or high school experience. Medical schools want to see that you can maintain top grades and be involved with your community and develop a passion for medicine.</p>
<p>Also, you’ve shadowed at Johns Hopkins. I’m sure that’s a wonderful place to shadow and has given you some real insight into the medical field–which is exactly what it’s designed to do. I think there are 2 ways to approach shadowing: a) go for quantity, shadowing lots of specialties for a short time each or b) go for quality, shadowing very few specialties but for a very long time each. For whatever reason, I chose to go for quality–no idea if it was the better option, but it’s led to some great recommendation letters, research opportunities, and has been talked about in each of my interviews. Shadowing a doctor or two for a day or two each doesn’t really do much in terms of shadowing. It seems like the current benchmark is about 100 hours–much more than that might not be useful unless you happen to fall into a great shadowing arrangement.</p>
<p>Research is a whole other side, and it’s great that you’re getting involved with your organic chemistry professor–especially if it’s tough to get on his good side. Your research project with him could open lots of doors for you, and if you’re at all interested in research, that’s awesome. Keep in mind that doing research well can take lots and lots of time, and like many other things…you’ll get out of it what you put into it. </p>
<p>If you have a knack for leadership (and I bet you do, given your boy scout involvement), finding a way to weave that into the things you do (volunteer, medical, research, etc) will probably just make you that much a stronger applicant.</p>
<p>Having time to devote to each of the things I mentioned–volunteering/leadership, medical, and research–is absolutely critical if you’re going to be a competitive applicant in the future, which is why designing your schedule so that you can do those things is important. If you’re going to continue taking lots of lab sciences and pursuing other degrees, just keep in mind that other aspects of your application may suffer as a result. In the end, the well-balanced applicant who maintains a high GPA, does decently well on the MCAT, and has a stellar resume is going to be more successful than the applicant who forgoes developing other sides of his application in favor of adding another major.</p>