tips for USC pre-med students

[mlouise]

Hey everyone, I wrote this out in 2011 for a friend of mine who was a freshman and starting the pre-med track at USC, some of it may now be out of date, please don't take this as final word on anything!

If you are a pre-med student at USC, here are some things you might like to know!

• It is going to cost you $2,000-$3,000 to apply to medical school, so plan ahead!! Application fees and flights across the country are not cheap.
  
• While it is not absolutely required, it would be helpful to pursue research, clinical experience, or both for one or more years in college. USC’s Trojan Health Volunteers (THV), a part of the JEP programs, is a great way to volunteer at a clinic or hospital while a student at USC, or you can always pursue clinical or research experiences during one or more summer break.
  
• The AMCAS application gives you 15 spots to fill with “Work and Activities,” and you should keep this in the back of your mind as you choose extra-curricular activities, so that you have some real experiences to share, things you were really interested in and spent some time on. They do not all have to be related to medicine or research.
  
• You should sign up for the MCAT at least 4 months in advance of when you’d like to take it. I signed up in early January, and was dismayed to find all test dates in southern California booked until May, and so ended up taking my MCAT the weekend before finals, when I would have preferred to take it in late March or early April.
  
• You don’t have to take an MCAT prep class, but they are helpful motivation for some people, and you do need to plan on studying for several months before the test. Prep books from previous years are probably up to date enough to learn from, and they are much cheaper. Also Kaplan sometimes hosts free practice tests on campus for the MCAT (and other grad school exams). You have to listen to a lot of sales pitch from them, but you do get to take the exam in a test-like environment, although it is on paper while the real exam is all on a computer. Don’t freak out, it is just another standardized test.
  
• The MSAR is useful for statistical information about med schools and the kind of students they are looking for, but there is some information that gets overlooked. Things to pay careful attention to when looking at schools include:
  
• Are you within the range of students they accept in terms of GPA and MCAT score?
  
• How many people apply to the school? (There are some big name schools with thousands of applicants and low acceptance rates, and you probably don’t want to apply only to these schools.)
  
• Are they more of a research school or are they focused on clinical medicine? Do they accept out of state students? (Many schools like U of Washington, most Texas schools, and state schools across the country do not accept students from other states, but some do, and these can be good schools to apply to.)
  
• Just because you haven’t heard of it doesn’t mean it couldn’t be a great school
  
• You should probably apply to at least 15 schools, possibly more if you can afford the application fees. About half the people who apply to medical school don’t get in, but applying to more schools will give you a better chance.
  
• Letters of recommendation:
  
•  Most schools look for two letters from science professors, and at least one from a professor in another area
• TA’s are not eligible to write letters
• USC has a letter of recommendation service, which you can find online and sign up for. Have faculty members give the letters to this office, and they will consolidate them into a “letter packet” which you can then have sent to the AMCAS when you start your application
• Nathalie Zuletta (nzul...@usc.edu) is, last time I checked, the contact person for this service.
• Prerequisites: Genetics and occasionally other classes are required by some, but not all medical schools, but are not explicitly part of the USC “pre-med” curriculum. As a Biology or Biochem major, students are required to take basically every class required by med schools, but some other related majors like Neuroscience may not be.
  
• Taking a year or more off between college and medical school is absolutely an option, and one that seems to be recommended by almost everyone who has done it. You can wait to take your MCAT until after college. You can take it twice. You can apply, get accepted, and defer your enrollment for a year or two while you do something else. Consider programs like Teach For America, teaching in a foreign country, working at an internship, or just taking a year off to consider your options and recover from being a stressed out pre-med student before you become a stressed out med student.
  

Some things that were helpful to me were:

• Kaplan’s free MCAT practice test
  
• The Kaplan review book I used to study for the test as an alternative to a class
  
• The MSAR, which as far as I know is not available at any library, or in the pre-health office, or at the career center, but if you pitch in with a few friends it is affordable.
  
• Tips from my classmates, older students and online pre-med student forums (the Student Doctor Network is both a blessing and a curse. It has useful info about things like what kind of interview to expect at specific schools, but also is largely overrun by pre-med students freaking out. I wouldn’t spend too much time there.)
  

 Good luck to all of you and feel free to contact me personally at mlo...@bu.edu if you have further questions. I'm a second year at BUSM, and happy to share my other experiences if you have more questions!

-Morgan

[Albert Herrera]

Thanks, Morgan. This advice is great!

-Dr. H.