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:
- What medical schools look for in an applicant – written by an medical school admissions committee member
- Lessons learn from the previous medical school admissions cycle – written by a current medical school student
What Medical Schools Look For In Applicants
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!
What makes a strong applicant #1: Academics
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.
What makes a strong applicant #2: Clinical Experience
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.
What makes a strong applicant #3: Intellectual Curiosity & Research
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.
What makes a strong applicant #4: Commitment to Service
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.
What makes a strong applicant #5: Personal Characteristics
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.
What makes a strong applicant #6: Interests and passions outside of medicine
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.
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Top 5 Medical School Admissions Lessons Learned 2020
Now, hear from an applicant who was successful in getting accepted to several top medical schools, including NYU and Johns Hopkins.
Preparation Guarantees Success
Medical school admissions, like many other things, is an area where proper preparation really guarantees your success (assuming no glaring deficiencies in your application). This means researching deadlines, reading about past successful students’ experiences, and preparing diligently for each component of the application cycle (starting your primary early, pre-writing secondaries, practicing for interviews). While the process will still be difficult, the final likelihood of acceptance to medical school will be much higher if you prepare well.
When I applied, medical school admissions preoccupied my thinking much of the time. I researched online about questions I had, which ranged from whether I should structure my work & activities in bullet or narrative form when compiling my primary application, to how to choose a medical school after I had heard back from most programs I applied to. While not everyone will want to be as preoccupied with admissions as I was, the lesson is that the information is out there. If you can gather that information and be informed, you can really position yourself to succeed.
One helpful place to get a big picture idea of the medical school admissions cycle is our Medical School Application Timeline 2021 blog post! This is a great place to start your own research as you dive deeper into each component of the application cycle.
Cherish your mentors and support network
I have always considered myself very independent and self-reliant, but one lesson my own cycle taught me is importance of having a strong support network and career mentors to rely on. Looking back, it surprised me how I took many of these relationships for granted. Whether it was having a close friend who was also applying to talk with, career mentors to seek advice from regarding medicine/medical school, or even loved ones to call—I cannot emphasize how meaningful it was to me to have these relationships whenever I felt conflicted or was unsure what to do. One lesson I have taken away from applying is to not take these relationships for granted and actively seek them out moving forward.
Talk to your friends and family members. Ask them about their day and sincerely listen to them. Make new friends with strangers. Meet with previous professors/physicians you have taken a class with, or done research for, or shadowed—and when you are further in your career, pay it forward for someone else! These will not only benefit you during your application cycle, but will also grow into intrinsically valuable new relationships.
Reframe interview day
Interviews are stressful. The stakes can be high, and no one really likes being judged or evaluated. But at the same time, if you reframe your mental model about interviews, you can turn a seemingly stressful in-person evaluation into a mini-vacation and opportunity to feel excited about your future! You will already be paying for the travel expenses, so you may as well get the most out of it.
Although the 2020-2021 cycle was completely virtual, hopefully 2021-2022 will be a lot different! Here are my thoughts about making interview day a lot more fun.
Explore the city! Buy some food from each place you interview at. Are you a deep-dish Chicago pizza type of person? Or do you prefer a New York slice? During my own interviews, I even kept a journal about the quality of foods we were served by medical schools!
And at your interviews- talk to your student host and fellow interviewees! This is a chance to learn more about your potential classmates! Don’t ask questions on tours for the sake of it but ask actual questions you have about the school. You could be going here if all goes well and that should feel exciting! And while this advice is obviously psychological beneficial, it might also ease your interview nerves and improve your performance.
Be proactive after your medical school acceptances
One important lesson I learned among many medical school admissions lessons learned is to be proactive after receiving an acceptance.
By and large, medical school admission is a “seller’s market”. That means schools can be extra demanding and even commit gross errors with little recourse for applicants. But once you have been accepted, the playing field is more even. While it goes without saying that you should still exercise good judgment, you can be more confident in deciding on whether a program would be a good fit for you by speaking with current students and the admissions office. For example, I personally scheduled phone calls with multiple medical students at final schools I was deciding between, and brainstormed lists of questions related to my concerns about the school for each call. Don’t be shy! I also knew of friends who were able to negotiate additional need- and/or merit-based scholarships through well-written emails (though your mileage may vary with this). Be proactive after your acceptance in order to make the most out of it!
Keep yourself busy during the application cycle. BE PATIENT!
After submitting your primary and secondary applications, the medical school application process can often feel like long periods of waiting interrupted by occasional bursts of activity with interview invitations and decisions. As such, it is a good idea to keep yourself busy with hobbies and activities to avoid going crazy. You should set up notifications for any emails related to admissions (either use an entirely new email account for applying and set that email to notify you of all messages; or create a filter for “admissions”/”interview” in your current account that notifies you when matching messages are received), and then don’t think about your application. Note that this is different from not preparing (see tip #1), as there is nothing to be done once your application is submitted or interview is over. So just relax and keep yourself busy!
I hope that my medical school admissions lessons learned will help you in your own application cycle! Applying to medical school can be stressful, but it does not have to be an unpleasant experience. If you can prepare by doing your research, establish a strong support/mentorship network, reframe your conception of interviews, be proactive after acceptances, and keep yourself busy, you can have a successful and enjoyable cycle!