5 Tips for Applying to Med School
Below are Andrea Copeland’s five tips on how to build a strong application that works for any medical school.
1) It’s important to have a “story” because it’s easier to identify with an applicant if they have an overarching theme to their application. Think of how all your jobs, volunteer work, extracurricular activities and interests fit together.
2) Having a few extracurricular activities that you’ve been doing for a long time looks better than having multiple short-lived activities. It shows that you’re committed and have genuine interests rather than just doing things for the purpose of adding them to your application/CV.
3) It’s helpful to contact your “verifiers” the summer before you apply (i.e. get their contact information) so that you’re not scrambling last minute.
4) When practicing for your interview, it’s important to review “content” stuff (e.g. why do you want to go into medicine, tell me about a time you worked on a team, tell me about a time you failed at something, etc.), but also practice the proper STRUCTURE for answering a “scenario” question. You’ll never be able to practice/prepare for every possible question, but as long as you have a good structure and logical thought process, that’s all they want to see.
5) The most important thing is to be yourself. It sounds lame and cliché, but if you, for example, do extracurricular activities that you’re not into, or if you try to talk about things that you’re not passionate about in your interview, it will come through. The committee members don’t care WHAT you’re interested in, as long as you have interests outside of school. They want to know that through medical school, residency, and your career, you will be able to maintain a healthy balance.
Good luck!
