<p>Will playing a club sport in college for one year look good on a medical school resume? I really want to play this sport (been playing for over 10 years), but only for freshman year because I'm going to a fairly easy school, and I think I'll be able to pull off a high GPA while playing this sport. It's Division II Ice Hockey, but it's not NCAA or anything.</p>
<p>To elaborate further, the sport will take up a significant amount of my free time that I could otherwise use to volunteer, etc. I’ll have practices around twice a week and games on most weekends. Also, I’ll be traveling to nearby cities that are 3-4 hours away on weekends and staying overnight. I just want to make sure if it’s worth it. Will med schools just glance over it, or will they take it into consideration.</p>
<p>Don’t have any experience with club sports, and I don’t know how med schools would view them, but I do have experience as a freshman premed (which I was for the 07-08 school year). </p>
<p>I didn’t do hardly anything premed related freshman year (except for holding a minor leadership position and finding a lab to work with (only did maybe…2h/week there), I suppose) and instead started getting involved and developing my extracurriculars about halfway through sophomore year. I’ve been working pretty steadily on developing my extracurriculars since about December of sophomore year, and my strategy worked great for me (will be an M1 in July 
). I believe most of my friends worked the same way–spent freshman year adjusting to college and growing up a little bit, then started to really get into “the premed thing” sophomore year.</p>
<p>I know I’m just one data point, and also just one opinion, but to me it seems like if it’s a sport you like and something you really want to do for a year, go for it. Getting involved requires you to have great time management skills, and if you’re serious about having a high GPA (crucial to premed success, in my opinion) then you’ll have to learn quickly how to prioritize your time and balance your busy life. I’m sure you already know how beneficial sports are to other areas of life off the ice too–working with others, communicating, self-esteem, social life, etc etc etc. Those skills are great to develop, and if you can develop them while playing a sport you really love and maintaining a high GPA…seems like a win win win in my book!</p>
<p>Again, just my opinion. It’ll be interesting to see what everyone else thinks.</p>
<p>No problem if you can keep your grades way up.
However, don’t try to use your sport to explain away less than stellar grades/lack of science ECs when it comes to med school applications.</p>
<p>The thing is, the school I’m going to is pretty easy. I know a lot people pulling off a 4. So I’m not worried about the grades. What I’m worried about is substituting more volunteering and research for a sport. Looking over some previous threads, I found out that med schools don’t really care about EC’s such as club sports. They’re more interested in activities that are medically related. The sport would just be another EC activity for them. I guess I’ll not play, and focus on that 4 GPA, and other clubs/orgs/volunteering/etc. It was for one year anyway, it won’t be that big of a deal.</p>
<p>My first suggestions would be to try balancing the sport with the usual ECs and such for a semester. It won’t replace medical EC’s, but it’ll be a nice supplement to them if you can keep it up. If that ends up driving you crazy then drop the sport.</p>
<p>I thought about that at first, but the long weekends out of the city will hinder me from doing much for medical school. If I play the sport, my ECs will be quite limited. Thanks for the help, I’ve made up my mind!</p>
<p>D. has done her sport on club team, but dropped it after freshman year. She felt that she could not do full schedule (only 4 times / week for 1.5 hours) because of time constraints and it was not cost justifiable for her. She did not care how it looks on her resume, she had tons going on to put on her resume. She has been heavily involved with her sport since she was 5 years old all thru HS - 2.5 hours daily practices including Sat., many out of town meets, even started a team at her HS. She still use it for workouts, she just loves it, but does not have enough time to be on a team. It is your decision. She had too much going on, including unrelated Minor, actually had 2 minors all thru Junior year and was 2 classes short of completing when she had to drop one of them because of additional requirements at one of Med. Schools on her list (ironically she did not choose this school). I am not sure if she has mentioned her sport on her resume (she might have ran out of space mentionning everything on her resume, as example, she did not even mention her 3 foreign languages).</p>
<p>Thanks for the response. It just goes to show that sacrifices have to be made. I mean, it’s not as if I’m never going to play again. However, college is mainly for academics/ECs. I’ll still need to keep myself active, but that’s what the gym is for!</p>
<p>DD did her club sport 3 years, then dropped it senior year to do all the focusing on volunteering, shadowing, medical internships, etc. Her GPA (3.4 or 3.5 going into senior year, where she then got something like 8 As, one A- or B+ to bring it up to 3.6 or 3.7) was a bit lower due to the time commitment of a club team that was year round and went to national champs. It was worth it for her, but she also had other showings of that sport on her resume, so it was a multi-line item.</p>
<p>*The thing is, the school I’m going to is pretty easy. *</p>
<p>What school is this?</p>
<p>You may know a lot of people getting a 4.0 in classes/majors that are easier than pre-med pre-reqs since most majors don’t require classes such as OChem or even the “real” Chem and “real” Bio. Many majors don’t even require Calculus.</p>
<p>Don’t underestimate how hard it will be to get top grades in pre-med pre-reqs with a challenging major. What will your major be?</p>
<p>Edited to add…</p>
<p>It looks like you’ll be going to UT- San Antonio with the plan to transfer to UT-Austin. When do you plan on transferring and at which school will you be doing your pre-med pre-reqs?</p>
<p>…yes, there are no easy school out there, none, zero.
Very top kids have to work extremely hard in every UG (including lowest ranked) to get reasonable chances at Med. School.</p>
<p>I don’t understand why people keep saying this. There are plenty of kids who will find any college to be easy, even as premeds. EVERY SINGLE alumnus who comes back to visit my high school reports that college is a walk in the park – except the ones who go to MIT. And this is from a school that doesn’t send anybody to schools lower-ranked than the UC’s.</p>
<p>Maybe the OP isn’t one of them and is just being cocky, who knows. But there certainly ARE people who do find college easy.</p>
<p>Hi - I guess in forum lingo I’m called a long term “lurker”. I have never posted, and running across cc was just serendipitous and occurred after my child was already in med. school. I don’t know much about this process and don’t know your circumstances, so maybe planning to this degree and dropping your sport is necessary. Like most parents, any info I give is not based on empirical data, but rather, is anecdotal. My bit of data doesn’t completely mesh with much of what I read here. My child at top 10 undergrad did not declare major until end of 2nd year and decided to try med school at about same time. So, essentially med school was not a variable in any decision during first 2 years. These first 2 yrs, child continued with loved ecs, had great social life, and took lots of potentially gpa deflating classes to help decide on major. Took one science class during summer after 2nd year, did research jr and sr. yr. Did some shadowing, took the kaplan course first semester junior year. Applied to ~10 places by September sr. year, and is at top 10 med school. Everyone is different and I’m certainly not recommending this or a similar approach. It could have gone in a different direction. It does kind of concern me that some seem to assume that this always has to be a grueling process.</p>
<p>Maybe the word “easy” was poor choice of words. I will be majoring in biology (B.S.), and I’ll be completing 4/6 of my pre-med requisites during my freshman year. I’ll probably be taking 31 hours of coursework, which is fairly light. I’m completing this “CAP” (Coordinated Admission Program) for UT Austin, which basically consists of one year at UTSA (provided that you maintain a GPA above a 3.2), and an automatic transfer to UT-Austin after that year. I’ll be taking General Biology, General Chemistry, English, and Calculus my freshman year. </p>
<p>I’m not saying it will be a walk in the park. I will have to give it my all to get that 4. However, the reality is that students taking the same classes at big state schools such as UCLA, UT-Austin, UC-Berkley, etc have a much lower chance of attaining a 4 for reasons such as weed-out classes, more demanding professors, etc. At UTSA, I was fortunate to get into the Honors College where the classes are much smaller, but not necessarily more demanding. Not playing the club sport will mean more time to focus on academics and extracurriculars.</p>
<p>Quite a big digression from the topic :)</p>
<p>bdm,
“EVERY SINGLE alumnus who comes back to visit my high school reports that college is a walk in the park”</p>
<p>-These EVERY SINGLE alumnus are all geniuses. I have mentioned regular kids.</p>
<p>Granted, my high school certainly has some geniuses, but not 100%. (And certainly not me – I was probably in the bottom half of the class.) Some of the kids went to Harvard and reported that college was easy. Some of the kids went to UC Davis and reported that college was easy. We had some at Penn, Berkeley, UCLA, UVa, Williams, Swarthmore – they all reported that college was easy. I wouldn’t think that the ones who went to Davis (usually the bottom 5% of our class or so) were “geniuses” by the usual definition of the word.</p>
<p>(This is starting to make me think that maybe my high school gets penalized during college admissions, if kids are always going to colleges that they find easy.)</p>
<p>It does not matter where they all went, it matters that they did not have to study for classes, tests, MCATs to get their A’s and top scores. When I said that colleges are all hard I meant for regular kids who actually need to study for their classes, tests, MCATs. They know that if they do not, they will not have what is needed. I am not familiar at all with elite colleges. I was talking about state UG’s.<br>
If you are genius who do not need to study, you can participate in any sport, including varsity Div. I. Why would not you? It is fun, it is something that you have been doing your entire life, it is huge social activity. Go for it!</p>
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<p>Well, okay. Colleges are all hard for students who find them hard. I suppose I can agree with that.</p>