Are You a Pre-Med Struggling With a “Should-I” Question? We’re Here to Help.

If you’re planning to apply to medical school, you might be wondering one or more of these things right now. Check out our guidance and related resources below.

Should I Take the MCAT again? 

We recommend taking the MCAT a maximum of three times—really, you should aim for two. (Medical schools prefer it.) "Since this exam’s introduction in 2015, the vast majority of examinees (just under 95%) have tested at most once or twice," reported the AAMC. "About 5% have tested three times.”

Data from the AAMC suggests that the longer the time between your first and second exam, the bigger the point gain. Many factors likely play into this, one of them is as simple as completing helpful college courses. 

You can take the MCAT seven times in your lifetime. The cap is three times in one calendar year and four times across two calendar years. There is no uniform way that schools handle multiple MCAT scores. Some will take your highest, others your most recent, others an average of your scores. So, if you scored really well on test one, you might do better to leave that score alone. But generally, we do recommend taking the test twice because it’s very likely that you’ll be able to improve your score by at least a couple of points.

Related: 

Key Considerations Before Retaking the MCAT 

Preparing for the MCAT: Tips and Advice from an Expert

Should I Apply Early Decision? 

We rarely advise clients to apply early decision. Not only do you have to be 100% ready to commit to the school where you apply early if admitted, but you must be an absolute all-star. If you’re an average applicant, you will not improve your chances of admission. If you want to apply for early decision, August 1st is the Early Decision Program (EDP) deadline for all medical schools that use the AMCAS submission system. (And most do.) The EDP will tell you if you were accepted or not by October 1st, so you will still have time to apply to other medical schools if you’re rejected.

Should I Take a Gap Year?

Maybe. In 2019, 43.9% of matriculating medical students had taken a gap year or two before medical school, according to the AAMC. You might even take a longer pause. Fun fact: The average age of a 2021 Perelman School of Medicine at University of Pennsylvania matriculant was 24—ranging between 21 and 30. 

So, why might you want to take some time between undergrad and med school? You can use a gap year to beef up your transcript with a post-bacc or master's degree. Or you might take a break from academics to immerse yourself in a clinical or research experience. 

If you're light on clinical or research experience, we highly recommend a gap year. Longer-term clinical and research roles will teach you things a short stint cannot. And, if you work full-time in a clinical or research environment, that will further enhance your candidacy. 

Maybe you want to put away more money before attending medical school. Never a bad idea. Whatever work you do—it doesn’t have to be medical, you could be a bond trader or consultant—should challenge you in the areas of leadership, critical and creative thinking, and problem-solving. This is a transferable skill set to medical school and residency. What a gap year cannot be: A year of nothing but MCAT prep and vacation. Schools need to know you can handle multiple priorities and that you value learning and helping others.

Related:

Blog Series: Earning Another Degree or Certification Before Med School

Clinical Experiences that Medical Schools Love

How to Find Clinical Experiences for Your Gap Year(s)

Non Pre-Med Courses That Impress Med Schools

Going beyond the expected premedical curriculum shows schools that broader learning is important to you. And, perhaps counterintuitively, that you are serious about medicine. We’ve compiled a number of courses below that will enhance your medical school application. 

• Calculus: Most schools want you to take a college-level math course—and this is a strong one to choose. (If you took a calculus course in high school, go for Calculus II in undergrad.) Calculus improves your comprehension of physics and chemistry. "Given that these subjects constitute a significant portion of the MCAT, it would benefit any pre-med student to learn calculus," according to an article published in Inquiro, The University of Alabama's Undergraduate Research Journal. 

• Statistics: If you strengthen your understanding of data, clinical studies will make much more sense. All prospective medical students would benefit from this course. If you hope to do research in medical school and beyond, definitely sign up for stats. 

• Behavioral Sciences: Anthropology, psychology, and sociology teach you about human beings. You'll learn to observe behaviors and extrapolate potential influences on them. That will help any student or physician in clinical work. 

• Languages: The number of languages spoken in a free clinic each day is mind-blowing. Having a second language on the tip of your tongue or your fingers—American Sign Language is great to know—will make you a more appealing med school candidate.

• Creative writing or other non-required English courses: Powerful writing will aid you during the application process. Becoming a better reader and writer improves your communication skills overall, as does giving feedback to, and receiving it from, classmates. 

• Other Liberal Arts courses: Whether you take art history, philosophy, or civics, it'll teach you to apply critical thinking to everything you do. And not for nothing, these courses are interesting.

Related:

Narrative Medicine Helps Physicians Gain Empathy, Make Connections, and Accept Difficult Experiences

Covid Crisis Brings Attention to the Need for Humanities in Medical School Curriculum

Your Pre-Med Priorities: How to Find Clinical Experiences for Your Gap Year(s)

If you've already graduated and are taking a gap year or two, you can find summer and full- and part-time pre-med research assistant gigs that require a BA on job boards like Indeed, Glassdoor, ZipRecruiter, etc. You can find work as a medical scribe in these regular job listings too. EMT programs are a pipeline to EMT jobs, ditto CNA programs to CNA jobs. The Commission on Accreditation of Allied Health Education Programs maintains a list of accredited paramedic programs. (Just bear in mind that becoming a paramedic is more intense than becoming an EMT.) You can also try the following:

1. Use your club contacts. If you're a member of your college's pre-med club, you have access to some alumni and/or guest speakers who are interested in helping prospective doctors. If they can't let you shadow or work for them because of their schedule or because their specialty doesn't match up with your goals, they may recommend someone for you to contact or even give you an email intro. Go Greek too. If you're a member of a sorority or fraternity, your organization may be able to set you up with a physician alumnus who is eager to help. 

2. Call a volunteer center. Sometimes a cold call is the way to go. Free clinics tend to be understaffed and are therefore aching to be your clinical experience. But they might not have a job posting up online. Call or email them and ask if they need volunteers. For a hospital volunteer center, go with: "I'm a pre-med student at (or recent graduate from) ABC University. I'd love to speak with someone about shadowing a physician and a volunteer position. I'm most interested in X, but I'm open to all opportunities." Academic affiliated hospitals are probably your best bets. 

3. Connect with a local physician for shadowing. Reach out to someone who specializes in an area you're interested in and is hopefully close to campus. (It would be ideal to shadow them multiple times.) You can call or email their office or direct message them on LinkedIn. Younger doctors are going to be more familiar with shadowing because they did it. Ask your own doctor about shadowing too. Yep, you're really hitting up any doctor who you know. 

4. Sign up for virtual shadowing. There are third-party organizations who can hook you up with a virtual opportunity. If you have other, more substantial clinical experiences, this is just going to be a bonus to your application. Virtual shadowing should not be your sole clinical experience. (It can be your sole shadowing experience.) Virtual can be great if you want to follow a physician with a certain specialty and can't seem to lock down a local one. Just remember, virtual group sessions tend to be large, so you're not going to get one-on-one mentorship.

Related:

Your Pre-Med Priorities: Gain Clinical Experiences

Your Pre-Med Priorities: Clinical Experiences that Medical Schools Love

Your Pre-Med Priorities: Finding Clinical Experiences as an Undergraduate

Your Pre-Med Priorities: Finding Clinical Experiences as an Undergraduate

Your school is built to help you find clinical and research experiences, be it through fellowships abroad, local summer internships, or work in the university's research labs. And many prospective medical students use personal connections to land volunteering gigs and shadowing experiences, which is great. Get these however you can… 

But, what do you do if your school isn't automatically flooding you with information on opportunities and your aunt's fiancé isn’t the top brain surgeon in your city? Try this. 

1. Seek out your pre-health advisor and pre-med professors. “[An on-campus pre-health advisor] may be in the academic dean’s office, a science professor, or a counselor in the career services office,” says AAMC. If you don’t know of an advisor on your campus, you can find out if there is one through the National Association of Advisors for the Health Professions (NAAHP) database. No advisor on campus? Contact the NAAHP to find a volunteer advisor. Can your advisor or a pre-med professor help you connect with someone at your university's medical school so that you can help in a lab or at an affiliated hospital? Can they give you the contact info of a physician alumnus who you can shadow? Your advisor and professors are motivated to help you; they want your application to be a success. You just might have to be the one who makes the first move. 

2. Hit up your school's medical school and science department. Same DIY deal. If, for whatever reason, your pre-health advisor isn't available to you, go ahead and contact these folks yourself. It shows initiative and you could make valuable connections on the administrative teams. 

3. Check out the Student Doctor Network's Activity Finder. We're big fans of SDN, a nonprofit, and overall terrific resource. Their Activity Finder is a one-stop shop that will guide you towards NIH and other research opportunities, volunteering gigs with Americorps and more, virtual shadowing experiences, and clinical work by location and position. 

4. Check other online listings—for research opportunities, especially. Besides SDN, some university websites have databases of summer research opportunities at both their college and others. (You don't have to go to a certain school to work at it. We had a client who went to UConn do her summer research at Yale.) And definitely peruse AAMC's database of summer research opportunities for undergraduates. 

Related:

Your Pre-Med Priorities: Gain Clinical Experiences

Your Pre-Med Priorities: Clinical Experiences that Medical Schools Love

Your Pre-Med Priorities: How to Find Clinical Experiences for Your Gap Year(s)

Your Pre-Med Priorities: Clinical Experiences that Medical Schools Love

There are a variety of clinical experiences that medical schools like to see in your W&A section because they inform your understanding of a medical career and the day-to-day work it entails.

They include: 

Medical Scribe: This is one of our favorite types of clinical experience. Working as a scribe allows you to see doctor patient interactions up close; you'll expand your medical vocabulary, read about things touched on in appointments (there's that intellectual curiosity!), and be a valuable part of a medical team. You can scribe at a top hospital or a CityMD clinic. What matters is exposure. Don't just describe the job to the school (they know what it is); share a meaningful story. 

EMT: You'll learn basic life support (BLS) and work in high-pressure scenarios. We had a client who worked as an EMT, and performed CPR on a patient, tag teaming with an experienced colleague so neither would become too fatigued and lag in compressions. Their persistence paid off; their patient survived. As an EMT, you'll have opportunities to help people and maybe even save lives. You can learn a lot from your colleagues, too. They've seen it all. 

Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA): This job will require a 4-to-16-week state-approved training program at a local community college or through the Red Cross. It will also involve major grunt work. You'll be responsible for multiple patients, taking their vitals, making sure they're moving, eating, and drinking water. You'll work closely with a medical team. You don't have to work full-time, and the hours are flexible. It's also a paid gig, and actual clinical jobs can look more impressive than volunteering. 

Free Clinic Volunteer: You'll interact with patients, doctors, and other medical professionals while providing care essential to your community. You'll meet patients with a variety of medical needs, and your entry about working at the free clinic should be about direct patient interaction. (You need at least one patient-interaction in your W&A.) Runner up for the best entry focus is a learning experience you had with a staff member. Showing yourself as a problem-solver is great. 

Research Jobs with Clinical Exposure: A twofer! You'll learn about one area of medicine in-depth and get to know patients. As a hospital research coordinator, one client became a passionate advocate for sickle cell disease (SCD) patients' health and dignity. Through surveying patients at every appointment, he developed strong bonds with them and their families. He learned about the daily trials of the disease and the stigma surrounding its most common treatment: opioids. Hospital staff often treated patients in extreme pain as drug-seekers. One 19-year-old told our client: "I just want to be respected." It affected our client deeply. His involvement in this clinical research project spurred him to join two studies investigating new SCD drug treatments. 

Shadowing: Shadowing is great introductory clinical exposure and prevalent among applicants—88% of Johns Hopkins' 2018 accepted students had shadowing experience. But to med schools, shadowing weighs less than volunteering at free clinics, doing clinical research, or working as a medical scribe, etc. That's because it typically doesn't lead to significant patient interactions. Still, shadowing someone in a field you're very interested in is informative, and you can have poignant experiences. 

Since patient interaction isn't common in these scenarios, you want to emphasize how else a shadowing experience helped you build clinical skills or expanded your knowledge of a medical specialty, preferably one you're interested in pursuing after medical school. If these things don't apply to your shadowing experience, here are some other things to consider: What did you see—and how did it affect you? Did a doctor calmly handle an angry patient? Did you seek more information on any condition a physician diagnosed in front of you? Did you learn something about a doctor's day-to-day life that you didn't know before? Unless you had one incredible experience or really need to fill up your W&A, grouping your shadowing experiences in one entry is a great idea.

Related:

Your Pre-Med Priorities: Gain Clinical Experiences

Your Pre-Med Priorities: Finding Clinical Experiences as an Undergraduate

Your Pre-Med Priorities: How to Find Clinical Experiences for Your Gap Year(s)

Your Pre-Med Priorities: Gain Clinical Experiences

The most important W&A entries are about your clinical experiences. Admissions committees need to know: Does this candidate have enough clinical experience to know what they're getting into? 

"You have to have clinical exposure," Keith D. Baker, PhD., assistant dean for admissions at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine told US News & World Report. "That's sort of fundamental. That experience lets us and other medical schools know that you have a reasonable expectation of what lies ahead, and if you don't have that, we simply don't have confidence that you're a serious candidate.” 

Schools need to know that you have seen medical care in action and gained experience with patients. "If you're not interested in working with patients, we're not going to be interested in working with you," Paul White, assistant dean for admissions at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine said in a 2019 interview with Case Western Reserve University's All Access: Med School Admissions podcast. In another podcast interview, this one with Admissions Straight Talk, White reiterated that while applicants might assume Johns Hopkins would favor research roles above all other things, the school wants applicants with clinical exposure (though that can be through their research roles). "Most students who are successful in our admissions process have had significant clinical interaction, and that goes well beyond shadowing," he said. "I’m talking about actually interacting with patients…in a position where they interact on a regular basis." The numbers back him up. Matriculation data for the 2018 entering class at Johns Hopkins showed that 91% had medical or clinical volunteer experiences and 24% had some type of paid medical or clinical employment. 

Jorge A. Girotti, PhD, MHA, and associate dean at University of Illinois College of Medicine, believes that the impact that clinical experience has on an applicant's career goals is the most compelling part of their application. "I feel that it makes sense to postpone applications until you have accumulated at least one year of clinical experiences," he told the AAMC. Taking a gap year to acquire more clinical experience is not looked down upon by medical schools. 

Related:

Your Pre-Med Priorities: Clinical Experiences that Medical Schools Love

Your Pre-Med Priorities: Finding Clinical Experiences as an Undergraduate

Your Pre-Med Priorities: How to Find Clinical Experiences for Your Gap Year(s)