Why is medical school so hard to get into

Most importantly do not let the stress of applying get the best of you. You have a plan, stick with it. The application is just half the story. You also need to ace the CASPer test , learn how to answer the most common medical school interview questions and practice with our sample MMI questions.

Like most type A personalities that enter medicine, we want straight black and white answers. Yes, medical school is hard, and every other synonym you can think of for hard. The volume of information and detail you have to recall is intense.

The subject matter is complex. The way you are tested will sometimes seem unfair and the standards you have to reach will feel unattainable. There is so much to know in such a compressed amount of time. Realizing how much you still have yet to learn is a humbling and important lesson.

Be prepared for the roughest years of your life until residency. You will have sleepless nights and you will be wishing you had more time to get everything done. It is incredibly tiresome and daunting. You will have bad days and be pushed to your limits. You will spend hours on a concept trying to understand it and apply it. Developing you into a pragmatic thinker is the goal of medical school. It is teaching you an insane amount of information so when you are presented with a problem you will be able to logically go through the steps to get to the right answer.

You are not expected to just memorize and regurgitate information. You have to learn to apply it and reason through your explanation. We Can Help! For every anxiety-filled moment of studying, there is a reward. Medical school was unlike anything I had ever experienced. There were many things that I did not anticipate before my first day. I could have never guessed how much I would grow as a person.

The patients you meet will impact you in many ways, and stay with you for the rest of your life. Empathy will have an entirely new meaning by the time you graduate. If you are lucky, your classmates will become a second family. You will see medicine through a different light and have a new appreciation for the field. You will remember why you got into this discipline and all the worries you had about the demands of medical school will go by the wayside. Your passion for medicine will outweigh how hard you perceived it to be.

Below are just a few concepts that impacted me the most during my time in school. They were tough lessons, but lessons well learned. They may seem simple and maybe you think you have them mastered. I thought the same thing before I started medical school. I quickly learned that the way I studied wasn't going to cut it, so I made some adjustments. Here are my best tips on how to survive medical school. I hope they help you as much as they helped me.

All work on this site is our own. The content for the Savvy med school search was found on the webpages of the respective medical schools. Search Schools. Blog June 2, The Savvy Premed. Post a comment. What gives? The Real Deadlines for Medical School.

Application Timeline. Capstone Project. State medical schools also depend a lot on your state of residence. The state schools are usually always heavily biased toward in-state students and reserve a certain number of seats for them.

Anecdotally, the bias appears real. But in-state applicants also usually benefit from reduced fees too. Without being able to pay for medical studies, it can be hard to get in! Getting into a specific med school is much harder. Even if you are choosing an average med school, getting into a specific school is hard from purely a numbers standpoint. This is another reason for tailoring your application to those where you have the best chance of getting in.

T10s and T20s can honestly be a major crapshoot. There are more applicants than there are seats for those positions. Sometimes great students are overlooked and other times an under-qualified one really fits the schools mission and connects with the school and gets accepted. In the U. DOs practice medicine in all 50 states and learn osteopathic manipulation on top of traditional medicine.

As you can see, you still have to work hard at undergrad and beyond to gain acceptance into DO schools. My interview for the school I was admitted to a DO school was much more intensive and required pretend patient interactions with actors, as well as a lot of emphasis on the reasons behind pursuing medical education and the kind of stuff I had worked on in health-fields while in college.

DO schools often have just as great expectations of their applicants too. Even if the stats may be lower than those going for MD, the process has its own complexities and challenges. They are not easy. Especially when you get to the more established DO schools. They will be more forgiving than MD schools if one aspect of your app fall poor, but they cannot and will not accept students with lackluster apps. DO schools are just as competitive as allopathic ones in their quest to recruit top talent.

However, none of that will make any difference if your MCAT scores are not up to snuff. As you saw with the AAMC data, these scores are no joke! Getting a low score could severely hurt your chances. You need to take time to prepare until you feel comfortable enough to get a great score during your first attempt.

Keep in mind that admissions panels can see the scores of every attempt you make at the MCAT. If you bomb it the first time, schools will see that. Another important factor in your medical school application is going to be your undergraduate GPA. Your grade point average is indicative of your overall performance and potential after matriculation. Unfortunately, not enough students are focusing on their academic skills. Indeed, clinical experience and your time spent outside of the classroom play a big part in your application.

Many students get through school making good grades. But is it high enough? You might have looked at application requirements several years ago and thought you were doing fine. However, those averages have likely changed, putting you in a precarious position. Your school grades and academic experience should be your top priority.

Aim for the highest grade possible to make your application as competitive as possible. Many medical school applicants think that participating in as many activities as possible is the key to getting accepted.

As a result, they spend years bouncing from activity to activity to check off some boxes and pad their application. Extracurriculars are important and medical school admission panels do like to see a lot of variety. In fact, many schools publish their recommendations and requirements for this. Some schools may require students to get a specific number of hours into a certain activity before even considering them. Typically, the extracurricular activities will cover things like community service, professional shadowing, patient interaction, leadership, and research.

Herein lies the problem with many applicants. Some of the most compelling students are the ones who commit to a few extracurricular activities and get a lot out of them. For example, the student who spent years working on a study that was published in a respected journal is going to be more competitive than the one that did the bare minimum in several activities.