What do medical schools look for in an applicant? Sometimes it feels like they want everything — an impossible superhuman who takes the hardest classes and gets all As, has dozens of research publications, runs a non-profit and has broken a world record. But rest assured, admissions committees know that premeds are human too.
In this guest blog post, we’re going to hear the perspective of 2 individuals:
Here are 6 factors that medical school admissions committees weigh when analyzing a student’s med school application.
Here are 6 factors that medical school admissions committees weight when analyzing a student’s med school application. This is straight from the source – unedited – written by an admissions committee member!
Medical schools want to know if you can handle the rigor of medical school, and of the lifetime of learning involved in the medical profession. For most admissions officers this is the very first thing they’ll look at to judge an applicant, which makes it imperative that you have the transcript and test scores to demonstrate that you are capable of handling, and excelling in medical school. Grades, academic honors, difficult coursework, and good test scores all contribute to this. One or two bad grades are not a deal breaker, and medical schools love to see an “upward trend” – so don’t worry if your first semester or year of college didn’t go as expected. And luckily, your undergraduate GPA is not the end-all be-all – you can overcome a GPA that’s lower than ideal by strengthening the other parts of your application.
How do you know you want to be a doctor? Medical schools want to see, as much as possible, that you have tested your desire to be a doctor. This is where clinical experiences are key – clinical volunteering, shadowing, research, and employment are all things that can give you the experiences you need to confirm your interest in medicine and learn if you’re able to handle some of the more difficult aspects of being a doctor, in addition to the fun and exciting ones.
Shadowing one time, or volunteering once a month for one semester are not going to cut it – the breadth and depth of your experiences are important. Start clinical activities early on in your college career, and continue with them. These experiences will not only make you a more attractive candidate to medical schools, who can be confident that you know what you are getting yourself into, but will give you things to write about in your personal statement and secondary essays, experiences to talk about in interviews, and most importantly a real understanding of what medicine is before your embark on the journey through medical school.
Medical school admissions officers want to know how you will contribute to a profession that is always reaching new understandings of disease and the human body. You can demonstrate your commitment to furthering humanity’s knowledge of science and medicine through involvement in research. Research can take many forms – “bench lab” research is the most common type (think pipetting and PCR), but clinical research, bioinformatics, and public health research are all common as well. And if your research passions are in economics, anthropology, or anything else, follow those instincts – the best research is research that you genuinely feel driven to do, and this will show on your application.
Medicine is first about service to others, and admissions committees want to know that you’re in this field for the right reasons. You need to demonstrate through the activities you participate in that you are committed to service. Long-term volunteering and involvement in causes you are passionate about is a great way to demonstrate to admissions committees that you are truly driven to helping others. This can be medically-related or not. If you’re passionate about education you could tutor elementary school children for free, or if you love working with older adults you might play the piano at a nursing home weekly. Medical schools aren’t looking for you to pursue any one type of volunteering – just pick volunteer activities that are meaningful to you.
While hard to put onto an application, here are a handful of some of the personal traits medical schools look for in their applicants: empathy, ability to adapt to challenging circumstances, self-awareness, intrinsic motivation, discipline, maturity, and teamwork. While there is no one way of cultivating or showcasing these traits, and these are by no means an exhaustive list, it’s good to think about them when writing your personal statement or secondary essays to see which of them you can reflect in the experiences you write about.
Finally, medical schools don’t just want premed bots, they want real people with passions and interests. Who are you as a person, outside of being a premed? Keep doing the things that make you who you are – it will help you get through this grueling process, and it will differentiate you from the thousands of other applicants. Your passions for dance, teaching, poetry, history, hiking, or whatever else it may be will all contribute in surprising ways to the doctor you become.