27 Rejections and 1 Waitlist for This 3.9 GPA Premed. Why? | Application Renovation (S3 E12)

that's why someone with a 3 9 gpa and a 514 mcat score doesn't get an interview application renovation season three well underway how are you doing today i'm doing good how about you i'm doing wonderful it's funny we uh during our little pre-chat here realize that you lived in the same town that i'm currently living in at some point so it's a small world yeah it's a very small town too we are not here talking about geography we're here talking about your medical school application reminds me kind of the the success or the non-success of

this application cycle how many interviews waitlists etc did this application cycle bring for you just one interview and one wait list one interview one wait list you got the interview so something is good that's going on where do you think you struggled with your application honestly i mean that's definitely like a mystery right now to me like i'm sure there's many areas that could be improved i just you know never really got that kind of feedback when i was um working on it the first time around but i think probably just being young um applying

straight out of undergrad um and possibly you know maybe not spending enough time in the clinic and um maybe showing them that you know i really do know what the career looks like so okay i think in my view i think that's okay who helped you with your application um it was mainly my dad but i had like advisors and i had one um dean from u of kansas look at it and he said you know that um he thinks i'm going to get multiple interviews and acceptances and then i got rejected from kansas like

a few months later no no so i was very confused um because yeah even my like premium advisor didn't even give me any feedback on my personal statement he thought it was good so i don't know maybe maybe i don't know i don't know what happened we'll look at it through the lens of of my eyes um and just a reminder for everyone i don't know exactly when this episode's coming out but my new book the pre-med playbook guide to the medical school application process is coming out it's scheduled for may 25th we're trying to

get it up uh moved up earlier so you can go pre-order that or it might be out by this the time this episode comes up so a lot of what i do here in application renovation is in that book all right you ready to look at your application yep all right so let's jump in so right off the bat i love looking at the uh the submission date is perfect um submitted nice and early so that's good um no big issues that i see in terms of demographics uh in terms of the additional information no

misdemeanors no institutional actions so that's great all right and then we get to let me change red red is uh anxiety provoking so i'll get rid of the a little bit um let's uh look at grades so obviously i'm seeing lots of a's here to begin with so i'm like okay grades probably aren't going to be an issue uh oh there's a couple b pluses um not an issue so we see grades right 389 388 is great so your your grades are not an issue right off the bat um and you did mention you're young

so you don't have a senior gpa on here at this point are you still taking classes or did you graduate early i graduated early okay awesome and i got like all a slash a minuses so it was pretty much the same last semester okay yeah it's interesting was it a strategic decision not to put your future classes on the application or did you just not know about that i didn't know that you were supposed to okay there's there's no real supposed to you can you don't have to the amcas doesn't mandate it but you can

put there's a category for future slash current classes that would market on there um okay mcat score 514 great score what happened with psychos that's the yeah that people are like that's where i get all my points yeah so i was scoring 129s like very consistently um but i had this kind of episode though i was supposed to take my mcat june 27th of 2020 but i was in the er that morning instead i had like a really bad case of some gi thing that probably was related i mean yes very well yeah yeah and

then so i ended up taking it july 7th i don't know you know like i didn't really study that week because i was so s like sick and recovering and in a lot of pain but i honestly like that's something that i'm still like kind of beating myself up about because it just came out of nowhere i mean i was really proud of how i did in the first three sections because those are like probably you know some of the higher scores that i worked really hard for so i think it was like a fluke

situation yeah and and and i bring it up just because it's funny in my mind it's like oh that's like that's the section where a lot of people yeah it would have been like you know 95th percentile or something if i just your your mcat score is great don't don't worry about your own cats they're not going to be scared by like oh she doesn't know psychology they they will not so okay not an issue at all all right and then we get into the the core of the application and here's where i think you

fell flat which if you've watched application renovation before uh if if you specifically or anything else anybody else watching this this is where students make or break their application it's not stats it's the story and i think your story does not come out at all in your application and and so we'll we'll get um to that right now so we look at this first experience here and it's it's a community service co-president of trojan support um a bunch of hours here over a good amount of time which is great but then you look at the

description itself and it's very basic you can see i wrote basic here as head of training and referrals for terms of support i have organized mental health first aid trainings for our members and took leadership on several blah blah blah it's very just basic matter of fact it doesn't really tell me who you are or the impact that you've made in people's lives right that's at the end of the day something that will tell me who you are show me the impact that you've made on people's lives when when you talk about here uh our

goal is to reduce the stigma around mental health issues by educating students on how to deal successfully with mental health crisis crises should they arise okay great right very basic description of what this trojan support is okay a lot of students feel like they have to give a description of what the activity is i don't think you do one line would have said we're an organization that provides mental health support to students done right i got it i understand what you're doing i don't need to know the ins and outs of the whole organization i

want to know about you so then we get to the most meaningful experience remarks and you see here i wrote all just stuff and you don't really answer why why is this most meaningful to you this is just a resume here my role was this when students are referred here's what we do while we were not able to host our usual training here's what we did right it's just it's just a list of things that you did and so i i don't know who you are through this i guess um yeah i definitely agree on

that and i guess i tried to just kind of show like my process through the participation like oh i saw this problem that existed in my like school community and then these are the steps that i tried to take to address it because you know that's like kind of what i hope to do you know as a doctor as well but and that's the and that's the core of the problem that every student makes is let me try to figure out what medicine is like and then i'm going to frame my whole discussion in my

descriptions and my most meaningful remarks around what medicine is like so that they can see that i'm ready to be a doctor that does not show me who you are that shows me who you think i want you to be okay and i'm glad you verbalized the thought process behind that because that's the thought process students have and it's wrong in my mind in my opinion so for me i guess like trying to just like like follow like what you're saying so um for me this club was a lot about like being around people who

care about the same things i do like you know just going to the meetings and stuff i just felt really just proud of to be there because i knew that everybody else had the same vision for you know just their peers as i did and that was like one of the main things that i liked about trojan support is that what you mean when you say like no i want to see you and your impact and i want to see that through a story so right now if you look at your application you just have

little little different pieces of the organization as a whole and what you did throughout it i would have loved to see you do a deep dive into one of these experiences where stuff was hitting the fan and you had to think about what i needed to do to fix it or depending on the actual role are you interacting with patients are you interacting with students who are having these mental health crises and tell me a story about one of those interactions that that will give me much more insight into who you are without you needing

to sell look at my compassion look at my communication look at my leadership look at my teamwork skills i just show me an interaction and that makes it much more personal and much more about who you are versus what you have here because i could i could take this i could cut this out of your application and paste it into somebody else's application who also volunteered for trojan support and i wouldn't really see a difference i couldn't tell that this came from you and it didn't come from them so then we continue on here um

this rivkin center ambassador again what's the story what's the impact you tried to get into a little bit of a story here talking about jenny i was particularly struck by a conversation with jenny one of our courageous survivors but that you you didn't really dive into that story you just were like hey i'm gonna mention jenny here and that's it so i would have loved to see more of that story behind that um presentations posters i i highlighted orange here to kind of cue into a question for you you wrote here my preparation went beyond

the scope of my findings though i was curious about the significance of my work in the scheme of cancer medicine what was your goal with that line i guess for me like i was in my lab i was always curious about the impact of the work that we were doing like okay i'm working with these like tumor suppressor and cancer cells in the hood but like what when is this if ever gonna become something that can actually help people what already exists in this realm of data um is this something that is just going to

be like gene therapy or you know is it going to be something different so just kind of things like that where i i read you know a few books from my lab like the emperor of all maladies and that was something that really struck me um just like because i'm so interested in just like the origins of cancer um so i think that's so how that comes across is hey look at me look at how much i love knowledge look at how inquisitive i am look at how much i go beyond what is required of

me it's a sales pitch again it's it's what do they want to see in a student well they want to see someone who loves to learn so i'm going to say my preparation went beyond the scope of my findings right i love learning so much so that i'm learning even more than i need to okay that's how it comes across again it comes across as a sales pitch and these are very common mistakes that students make as soon as i read that i just shut down because i'm reading a story or a description from a

student who is trying to paint a picture of what they think i want to read and i'm not getting to understand who you are that's why someone with a 3 9 gpa and a 514 mcat score doesn't get an interview because the reviewers of your application read it and go another one right another student who's just trying to sell me on what they think a good medical student a good physician is supposed to be okay and they're not connecting with a human being extracurricular activities great you have a yoga instructor here um i i highlighted

50 hours here because this is over the course of a couple years and you have 50 hours so in my mind this is just a fluff entry um over the course of a few years 50 hours i'm like you didn't do anything with this why why did you put this in your application i guess just because yoga has been such a big thing for me like while even if i only taught for 50 hours i took classes for a lot longer and um so i just wanted to include it as something that like makes me

me but okay so if i were to look down i'm looking at the rest of your um activities so i would have put yoga as a hobby instead of putting it as an extracurricular activity as a yoga instructor gotcha so that you could have had more hours and it would have highlighted more about who you are as someone who is a yogi and not someone who spent a few hours over the course of several years as a yoga instructor again this looks like fluff to me someone who is trying to sell ooh look i'm a

leader i'm a yoga instructor all right so you just gotta be careful with those kind of entries and then the the line here that i highlighted while yoga is not a substitute for soccer or basketball it's a very negative statement why would you put that i guess i was kind of thinking about how young kid like because i think i talked about it in the scope of like the orthopedic institute um and how i taught there and i guess i was kind of referring to how stupid like young kids you know often play sports like

soccer or basketball and they don't they very rarely do yoga um but i was just kind of trying to provide like more evidence for why yoga might be beneficial to them um even though it's not super common okay but i probably didn't phrase it in the best way you're right okay uh we keep going you have publications a very technical i wrote here so just you got very technical with your research stuff and and doesn't have to be technical you're not trying to prove that you know the ins and outs of the research i just

again i want to understand kind of your role and your impact on the research what did you do i think i did that because i'd already like i have like one major entry for research and then a poster presentation and the publication so i guess that's a question for you in terms of like should i just combine all of those into one entry or is it okay to have multiple but just has to be more personal it potentially is okay to have multiple i don't think there's a right or wrong as long as it makes

sense in the end this one no it's just very technical and at the end of the day doesn't doesn't help me understand who you are um community service here as a senior health educator peer health exchange again i would love to see a story of you interacting with whoever you're interacting with on a day-to-day basis again it's just a lot of basic description about your day-to-day don't i give a story in the second um paragraph about um a girl asking about just um like consent and things like that but i could i could expand on

it i guess there's no story here um i or i just that example yeah that's not a story that's one line that says my boyfriend keeps asking me to have sex but i'm not ready can i say no that's not a story that's just one line story an actual interaction showing impact uh and then we have your first clinical experience here right so we we've gone through a bunch of activities and we get to your first clinical experience from 6 18 to 6 19 so over the course of a year 60 hours so again a

year 60 hours not a lot of time spent doing this and then over the course of uh august 2019 to march 2020 again pandemic obviously probably prevented that you had more hours so you were doing more things which is good you call it clinical experience but then you talk about organizing patient records planning fundraisers and making phone call follow-ups with patients all non-clinical activities so it's a big red flag it's like okay we finally get some clinical experience and the things that you focus on are non-clinical activities so is this really a clinical experience so

we keep reading and we find out i spent hours making friendship bracelets and then i just give up at that point okay this is not clinical experience i'm gonna move on and then a lot of students love these kind of i learned it taught me type statements which i just i don't think help on an application so you said it educated me of how similar their questions and concerns were and their need for a voice of comfort and care okay all right it's like hey i know what patients need great you're gonna learn a lot

more in medical school and residency so that's that's not why i'm accepting a student i'm not accepting a student because they know that their questions and concerns are similar okay and then we get to research and lab over the course of a couple months which is very interesting 730 hours over two months yeah is that correct yeah because i it was a um like an international we flew to oxford for like a month and a half about a month so did you just do 24 hours times however many days um probably nothing i guess not

but like it was yeah i guess it was like nine or ten hours a day for a month but i guess that's well that would be 300 hours right 30 days 300 hours yeah i got yeah i guess i just like included like the entire time i was there which is probably not the right yeah so so when i see that many hours in that short amount of time it's a huge exaggeration it's the same struggle that military members have right because it's a 24 7 job in reality or on paper but in reality it's

a normal job nine to five obviously deployments and exercises and all that stuff i get it i understand but don't count 24 hours count eight hours ten hours et cetera and then again the sales pitch right my cultural awareness will be essential to prescribing relevant and effective treatments and you're trying to sell i have the skills necessary to be a doctor i don't care about that i want to know who you are right help me understand you as a person okay and then i will want to invite you for an interview physician shadowing so you

have a decent amount of shadowing it's from a couple years ago i would like to see more why don't you have more shadowing um i was supposed to shadow summer 2020 with um a cancer specialist um over stanford but obviously the thought wasn't viable so yeah i i knew that i didn't have enough shadowing and that was definitely something that i was gonna i was relying on okay in the grand scheme of things shadowing probably is not the biggest issue for you it's gonna be clinical experience um yeah and i've fully worked on that in

the last like four months i've worked as a clinical research coordinator i've been in the clinic for like yeah great so you knew that as a an issue and then again another what i see as a fluff entry a couple years 30 hours talking about this vegan club and and what is involved there so i see it as a fluff entry just because of the hours so it's better than just not to include it i probably wouldn't or try to figure out how to increase the hours without lying and then we get more research right

in 430 hours here we have research here is 730 hours we have uh publications here we have a presentation poster here and i start to see this picture of lots of research zero clinical experience are you sure you want to go to medical school and that's that's always the question that'll come up and so the the story that you're getting at just doesn't paint a picture of someone who understands what you're getting yourself into uh and then we have swim club i'm just i highlighted intercollegiate athletics there's there's no strict definition of this i consider

intercollegiate athletics like you are a division one division two division oh yeah that's not a person all right not swim club not rugby club not any of the clubs and i know clubs can get competitive and there's travel and all this stuff that's not intercollegiate athletics intercollegiate athletics for the purposes of this is like you were recruited to go play a sport and and that just typically tells a different story um for some of these and again i understand club sports you can be recruited don't don't come at me um but i just i don't

like that category for for that kind of stuff um i i've seen intercollegiate athletics which is it just like a big no for like intramural sports i'm like no that's that's not uh intercollegiate athletics um extracurricular activities you have photography here again you used it to sell my pursuit of professionalism look at me and then we get to teach aids intern again i would love to see a story you basically just had a list of tasks here yeah and then we get to your personal statement and here's where here's where i think the personal statement

just did absolutely nothing for you it just you try to get too fancy by combining photography and how you look at your photography subjects and how that matches with medicine let me tell you right off the bat for everyone listening do not try to take hobbies or your past experiences as an athlete as a professional whatever and tie it to medicine it just doesn't work and so you can see here right you talked about being a photographer and how you look at each person and the smile and the laugh and the glance and oh my

gosh like as a doctor i need to look at each individual and blah blah blah right you were trying to make all these connections that at the end of the day i just want to understand who you are and why you want to be a doctor right and and much more focused on the why do you want to be a doctor i don't have it through your clinical experiences because i don't see any clinical experience there or not your clinical experience but your extracurricular activities because i don't see any clinical experiences there i see lots

of research i see a little bit of shadowing i see what you call clinical experience which isn't clinical experience based on what you told me you did and so i get to the personal statement going okay i hope i hope you made the common mistake of i talked about it in my personal statement therefore i'm not going to talk about it in my activity list which is a mistake you should talk about it in your activities as well so it gets your personal statement hoping that there's lots of clinical experiences that you're going to focus

on here and you first start off with hey i'm a photographer that's going to help me as a doctor right what you took the personal statement to mean was here's how i'm ready to be a doctor and all i want to know is why do you want to be a doctor so you can see here the things that i highlighted uh i'm going to apply this perspective to the practice of medicine as well again you put it in the present tense i apply this perspective to the practice of medicine as well you don't practice medicine

now so yeah i'm like uh that's a little off um and then these learnings will help me enhance my treatment plans as a future physician again i don't care that you think that my role right now is to not is not to accept or invite people for interviews who think they're going to be amazing physicians i hope we all think right i hope everyone thinks they're going to be an amazing physician or else why would you do this right like i want to be a doctor i think i'm going to be a mediocre doctor so

i'm just gonna try it and see right everyone everyone hopefully wants to be an amazing physician so it's just it just doesn't work again accumulating skills and knowledge to help contribute to the scientific fields you're just sales pitch sales pit sales pitch and then here's like ooh i love to read so i like science i'm a learner you should accept me i'm ready to tackle the the volume of information all right again just nothing is here's why i want to be a doctor it's here's why i'm ready to be a doctor here's how i have

the skills necessary to be a doctor and number one anyone can say they have the skills necessary to do whatever right so so that to me doesn't mean anything and number two you've already proven that you don't have experiences in and around patients or at least you didn't show that to me in your extracurricular activities and so for you to now draw conclusions to say look i'm ready to be a doctor when you haven't put yourself in situations to show what medicine is like i just i don't trust anything you're saying at this point again

just the stuff that you're talking about botanical gardens in the city of oxford and kind of look did you know that tylenol is a plant like okay great why do you want to be a doctor and and so we get to the end of your personal statement and people can kind of slow down and read it and see what i'm highlighting here but at the end of the day i don't understand why you want to be a doctor i don't think you have enough experiences to understand for yourself why you want to be a doctor

and therefore i'm not going to invite you for an interview which is kind of the result of your application cycle amazing stats you've proven that you are good academically but now i need to make sure you understand what you're getting yourself into and then just one other thing i want to highlight here again is negativity i see this um i could hear the frustration and pain and their voices when talking about disappointing doctors appointments and distressing negative test results i read that and i go this is someone who thinks they are better than all the

other doctors out there right now right look it look at all these disappointed patients because of these crappy doctors i'm going to be better okay yeah that was not my intention i hope not i i hope um but that's what i see and then again you tried to get fancy with bringing it back to photography here this last sentence i just i don't like that style of writing for a personal statement for a poem great personal statement no and then we look at school list and you applied to 32 schools at least here on this

application 28 secondaries yeah 28 secondaries and we have 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 of them public out of state schools yeah why did you apply to that many public out-of-state schools i honestly just didn't really know what i was doing when i created my list um i didn't really have any like advice or i just kind of went by stats and schools that seemed you know like a good fit and i could definitely use help on number number one downfall is using stats to apply to schools okay almost

then what do you use um use the schools themselves what is this what is the school's curriculum what is their mission what is their vision what what sort of access to resources that really drive you and motivate you do they have so looking at the schools and not the stats your stats are going to get you in almost anywhere so you should not be looking at stats for schools you should be looking at the schools and doing lots of research looking at stats is the lazy way to create a school list and inefficient because almost

half of your list are going to be schools where you probably have zero shot unless you have significant ties to the state um and so you just got to be careful right i have university of colorado i should have checked as well university of colorado is a very out of state friendly school and and i didn't look at the rest of them to determine if they're super out of state friendly as well but uh it just depends right university of michigan as well super out of state friendly school for a public school so great stats

i don't understand who you are why you want to be a doctor you didn't have the experiences yet it sounds like you're getting the experiences now so you can tell a better story yeah i guess um i just wanted to ask about so maybe i'll do a better job of like summarizing what exactly my clinical experiences were in in undergrad um and a lot of it was like even if you do volunteer in the clinic there it's not like you're like the way that it's set up is just you're not really allowed to do that

much like actual being in the patient room kind of clinical stuff it's like oh here you have to like do stuff that's gonna help doctors like behind the scenes and that's what yeah and that's that's just not clinical experience right when when i first volunteered in the hospital thinking i was getting clinical experience i sat at the information desk pointing people to the elevators into the gift shop i was like i'm getting clinical experience and it just wasn't clinical experience and so you have to realize that you just spent a lot of time doing something

whether that's the only thing you could do or could get or you thought it was clinical experience it just wasn't so now you move on and it sounds like you understand what clinical experience is now where you're actually interacting with patients and doing stuff with patients in some sort of a clinical way right making friendship bracelets with patients is not clinical experience playing bingo at the nursing home with the residents is not clinical experience um so there there are lines obviously that have to be drawn and it sounds like you understand that now and you're

doing things now which is great yeah so for the last few months i've been working as a clinical research coordinator so i've been kind of like 90 responsible for making sure the trial like goes smoothly on the ground and doing the kgs on the patients and sputum inductions and taking down all their data and their blood draws and all of that so that that's clinical right perfect yes that is that is clinical experience and now the goal is moving forward reflecting on those experiences and showing the reviewer how those experiences have made you want to

be a doctor right at the end of the day looking at your personal statement i have no idea why you even went down this path to begin with so i would recommend it based on your personal statement you did not read my personal statement book um i will send that to you i'll send you a pdf of it as as a guest of the application renovation i'll send you the pdf of that book i'll send you my new book as well um to really help you frame the story of here's why i'm pursuing medicine because

that's the story that you need to tell not the sales pitch of i'm ready to pursue medicine understood yep yep okay all right introspection to do for sure yes everyone everyone does so hopefully this helps hopefully it'll help you put together a strong application this coming cycle in terms of when to apply next i think you're ready to apply this next cycle based on the fact that you're working towards all of the deficiencies in this application already so um you don't have any work that you need to do towards stats it's the clinical experience which

you're getting and then just the writing which you're you'll uh you'll work on yep all right thank you so much for coming on hopefully this helps and hopefully it helps a lot of other people watching this as well