Monday, August 27, 2012

Plus and Minus of Being Everything but Traditional

On Student Doctor Network, there is a much-celebrated study schedule to help students prep for the MCAT. It lays out a great 3-month plan of attack. Of course, it is 3-months of studying 6-8 hours each day. Yeah, right. Maybe, just maybe, you can stick a part-time job on top of that. Or maybe you could still have time to spend on one class during the semester. Or maybe you might be able to meet the needs of a self-contained child (whatever that is supposed to mean). But, honey, there ain't no way you are doing it all.

This brings me to the question "Is being a non-trad an asset or a liability?" Just earlier today, a friend asked me to read someone's letter of intent to get into PA school. I've never met the would-be physician assistant, so I only "know" her based on her writing. She sounded so young. In fact, I'd say she sounded too young, too lacking in maturity. Youth is not a bad thing by any means (sigh, gray hairs), and age does not necessarily bring with it maturity, but there was something definitely missing. The conviction of someone saying "I really want to do this because I've been a CNA and I liked helping the old people" is a vastly different from someone who has experienced adult life. I understand what it means to enjoy work-life balance. Physicians score lower on this metric than the average adult. This means something completely different to a non-trad working wife and mother than it does to a single 22-year-old. I've got a very different vantage point to view that from. That's not to say that my vantage point is superior; it just makes me a more informed applicant. That's an asset.

So that brings me back to the 3-month wonder schedule. The author is honest in saying that it isn't for people who can't commit to studying full-time. Is that the key to success on the MCAT? Do you really need to devote three months of full-time study in order to get a competitive score? When I first started looking at applying to medical school, I was irked by all non-trad info I was finding. It seemed like common consensus is non-trads need to go DO because they don't perform as well on the MCAT and with GPA. The notion is that DO schools tend to look at the whole person and value the diversity of life experiences non-traditional students have had more than MD schools. This ruffled my feathers a bit. I'm one of those non-trads who didn't blow-off undergraduate school. My GPA (anyway you cut it: bachelors, postbacc, graduate, science, etc) is 3.88 or higher. I thought I would totally kick the MCAT.  I was wrong. For me, the MCAT as a non-trad was definitely a liability. Working full-time, helping kids with their homework, and prepping for my lab class (thank goodness I didn't take the lecture that semester) made finding MCAT study time a real challenge.

The MCAT is a 5+ hour exam. Testing fatigue was a real issue. At some point, I found myself thinking, "I don't care what the answer is, I just want this damn thing to end." In all of my prep efforts, I only did one full-length practice test mimicing the real format. Big mistake. I think, finally, I've worked through the test-fatigue issues. It is still grueling, but not as hard as it initally was.

The biggest challenge of the MCAT is the simple fact that there are dozens and dozens of topics to master, yet there are a mere 52 questions in each of the science sections. I know I have not mastered all of the topics in the study guide, and so chance comes into play. Maybe the topics on that test are my forte and maybe they aren't. In preparing for the exam, I've taken five different tests from e-MCAT. These exams are honest-to-goodness tests from AAMC. I thought that my practice tests should roughly correspond to the score I got on my real test. Nope. I score 1-2 points lower on the physical sciences and 2-3 points lower on biological sciences. (At least my verbal score was 1-2 points higher than my practice scores.) Having graduated with a degree in social sciences 16 years ago and having multiple full-time commitments makes being a non-trad a definite disadvantage for the MCAT.

I'll let you know how this Saturday shapes up.

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Such a LONG road

This is one ridiculously long road to go down. (Yeah, yeah, yeah--I know that applies to all of medical education.) If you are thinking about applying next cycle, push your "submit" button as close to June 1 as possible. Maybe, just maybe, that might make the wait a little less painful?

I applied to medical schools through three systems in July: AMCAS, TMDSAS, and AACOMAS. I started AMCAS first (in May) and submitted it last (early July) as I felt so particular about what I wrote for each of my 15 extracurriculars. I hope that extra crafting helped, because it took the full six weeks ("expect 3-6 weeks") to get verified. That was nerve-wracking. The Texas system was the quickest one to verify. I got verified with them in just under three weeks. AACOMAS was three weeks and a couple of days.

As of August 21, my application is complete at 9 schools. (It helps that Houston, San Antonio, and Gavleston do not require a secondary application.) Right now I am insanely excited to finally be verified by AMCAS and feel the urge to push out three or four secondaries by the end of the week. A little reality check, though. School starts tomorrow for my kids. I'm retaking the MCAT in 10 days, and I just started a genetics class at today. Secondaries must wait until after the MCAT is put to rest.