stuff I wrote on quora

Q. What is the minimum GPA required for acceptance into medical school without considering the MCAT score?

A. Disclaimer: I’m just a pre-med that obsessively consumes pre-med content. Please consult a real pre-med advisor. If there isn’t one at your school, you can get one assigned for free. Just Google “NAAHP pre-med advisor”.

Generally, med schools matriculates have an average of at least a 3.5 GPA, often higher (especially in the sciences), and an application is going to get thrown out immediately without a 3.0 cGPA. However, that’s just a general rule. Some programs do have a hard and fast cut-off for even being able to get your app considered, others explicitly state that they have no hard and fast minimum because of their holistic approach to application review.

Common pre-med advice from adcom members and experienced advisors says that adcoms will look at a great upwards trend and stellar science grades to off-set the effect of an awful cumulative GPA, but it really just depends on at what point they decide it’s not worth it to take into account one’s underdog story.

All that said… no adcom is very likely to spend any time looking at an app with anything lower than a 3.0. At least, not any American schools. Some in the Caribbean might be more forgiving, yet they do actually reject a good number of candidates apparently.

In any case, it just takes one acceptance, just one program taking a chance on the candidate. And there are certainly many well-rounded applicants who got into good programs with a lower GPA. It can be done, but only likely with stellar extracurricular activities, good MCAT, and a solid upwards trend for the GPA (especially in the hard sciences).

Q. Can I get into medical school with a 518 MCAT?

A. Sure can. That’s a score in the 95th percentile, which is pretty darn good!

That said, one can also be rejected with that score if the rest of their application falls flat. One can get into med school with a 500 MCAT, too.

Medical schools like well-rounded applicants, so if you’re at the 95th percentile in the MCAT, try to be 95th percentile in volunteering, shadowing, research, clinical experience, science coursework, etc! Most of us can’t do that (I mean, obviously—that’s how statistics works), but if you shoot for the moon, you’ll land amongst the stars and so on.

Just make sure you’re trying to do all these things with your own personal interests and passions in mind. Schools know when you’re just checking boxes, so focus on being true to yourself as you become the best you can be on the way to medical school.

Volunteer for organizations whose mission you’re passionate about. Do paid clinical work with a population you’re passionate about serving (love working with the elderly? Go do that!). Tutor students in a subject you really loved studying! Take higher level science electives in something you’re truly curious about. Get involved in research that excites you. Shadow physicians in the specialty that drives you to want to go to medical school.

Personally, I think this is how one falls in love with the process. Imagine living this productive and full life where you’re doing things you love every day and you’re simultaneously leaving the world better than how you found it, and in the background of it all, you’re becoming this great version of yourself that medical schools would love to have in their program! What a sweet deal! At least, that’s what I’m trying to do myself.

Good luck, and enjoy along the way (:

Q. What is the appropriate way for a patient to interact with a nurse? Should they always be polite, friendly, and respectful, even if they do not like the nurse for personal reasons?

A. If you want people to be polite and respectful to you regardless of their personal judgments or opinions, please afford them the same. Whether you’re dealing with nurses or someone out on the street— be kind.

Nurses understand that being ill or injured is likely to make patients feel less than happy, so no one expects Mary Poppins cheer out of you. But there’s no need to be disrespectful or anything, just be courteous as possible. Nurses generally are doing their absolute best.

Q. How can an aspiring pre-med student improve their GPA?

A. If you read NOTHING ELSE in this post — just go to http://NAAHP.com and search for a pre-med advisor if you do not have one available at your college. This is how I found my advisor, she is AMAZING, and I am so grateful for her volunteering her time and expertise for students like me. If you DO have an advisor or pre-med association at your college, make sure to pose this question to them.

I’m only a pre-med student myself, so I’m going to preface this by emphasizing strongly that this only my personal strategy. I’ve cobbled my strategies together from hours of reading and listening to various pre-med advisors, mostly on YouTube. I’ll share some links at the end. Please scroll all the way down to skip my background info.

For some background: I have a non-science bachelor’s during which I accrued a ridiculous number of credit hours. Somewhere close to 200 total. My GPA as calculated by AMCAS (using a FREE tracking service called mappd) is slightly above a 3.1, even after starting my post-bacc work during my current degree (nursing). My GPA so far after 27 credit hours is 3.87, but that’s not enough to really make much difference in my GPA at all.

Even after 70–90 more credit hours (which I’ll get with pre-med prerequisites and the rest of my nursing classes including my BSN), my GPA only has a distant hope of climbing from 3.13 to MAYBE a 3.43 if I managed to get all A grades (no A- grades and definitely no B grades). Most likely I will end up with a 3.2 or 3.3 cumulative GPA.

So, for me, my strategy depends on why I was getting poor grades in the first place. Sure I had some extreme circumstances that life threw at me, I won’t get into that because it doesn’t really matter— extreme circumstances will be thrown at us in medical school, too. Will that mean we drop out? We have to convince admissions committees that we are a safe bet, that we’re not only academically qualified but resilient enough to handle life challenges and keep on keeping on with a demanding curriculum. If I only choose to look within for answers about my poor academic performance in the past, this is what I find:

I was not interested in what I was studying, I was only doing what other people expected me to do when I was in high school. I was good at it, good enough to receive a full scholarship doing it, but it wasn’t really MY passion. It was just what I happened to be naturally gifted in. When I finally did realize I wanted to pursue medicine, I felt so discouraged by my own bad habits that I was too scared of failure, and this kept me in a loop of adding pre-med courses and dropping them a week into the semester. Adding, dropping. Adding, dropping. “I want to do this, but what if I fail?! No, I should wait until later.” Over and over, stumbling through different courses in an hundred different subject areas, unable to figure out something I really wanted that didn’t scare me.

Finally, after a few years off, I just threw up my hands and finished a catch-all bachelors based on the huge number of credits I’d already accumulated. I just wanted to graduate.

It’s been a few years since I graduated, and almost a decade since my first foray into college life ended. When I decided to go back to school, I was a decade older and had spent plenty of time having regrets, so I figured it was time to stop regretting and start becoming disciplined. Sure, it scared me at first, but I was more scared of looking back decades from now and regretting letting my fears get the best of me. Discipline weighs ounces, regret weighs tons, as the saying goes.

MY STRATEGY: Fixing my study habits (Justin Sung) and adopting a truly useful planning tool (Trello, explained in the video below) unfortunately will NOT do anything to really raise my GPA by much. So, have to take a different approach. Fortunately, admissions committees do often appreciate an underdog story of sorts, where you might start off rocky but then demonstrate extremely high grades in your last 30–60 credit hours in a DIY or formal post-bacc program or special master’s program (there is a video on that at the end, but do more research please).

One silver lining for me is that I did not take any of the requisite science classes until I gained a newfound passion, confidence, and learned solid habits. With those tools under my belt, I can at least show a very high science GPA, which should tell the story almost by itself when compared to my considerably lower cumulative/non-science GPA.

I’m not sure what your GPA looks like, it might be higher or it might be lower. But take comfort in the fact that you might also have the grit and determination to follow in the footsteps of a plastic surgeon who got into med school after having a 2.6 GPA— he didn’t find his passion for medicine until late in his college career and yet he made it into arguably one of the absolute most competitive specialties in medicine. I encourage you to watch this interview he did and take his advice.

Good luck and Godspeed! You CAN do it!

P.S. Really do your research on all of this. Go to premed Reddit, you’ll find a bottomless wealth of knowledge and advice, some good and some bad, but if you don’t read and learn what’s going to work for you and what won’t, you’ll just be going into this blind and that’s not good.

LINKS:

Justin Sung has a wonderful channel full of content about learning and studying strategies.

This is a great walk-through video explaining how to set up and use Trello, which is a FREE app/website, you do NOT need to pay for it. I did for a bit and I didn’t even use the premium features at all. Now I use the free version and I notice no difference in functionality—

This is one of many videos about post bacc programs for GPA repair or general application enhancement.

This is an interview with Dr. Richard J. Brown, plastic surgeon on the Medical School HQ channel (amazing AMAZING channel for pre-med advice) discussing his path from direction-less undergrad to medical school.