According to the MCAT site, “the average cumulative scaled score of a successful medical school applicant was 29.7”. The school you work for sounds more … exclusive than the one the OP spoke of.
(Can’t imagine why anyone would want to go into medical school. Wouldn’t catch me dead with such a massive expenditure of effort. I have, however, considered in the past joining the “lazy geniuses” as a math major. Maybe your brother should do research?)
It’s in biology and yes, it has been kinda fun. God willing, I can graduate this semester and I can join my sister in being called “Dr.” In the meantime, I’m undergoing the stressful process of looking for a job. I’m sure when I get one, something else will pop up and tax my worry-energy. It’s a never-ending game.
Your brother has options a-plenty. If he doesn’t get into med school, tell him to apply to grad school, into a Ph.D program. If he likes it, he’ll get a Ph.D out of it. Many programs nowadays have MD/Ph.D programs. And he would get paid.
Or, he could take some courses as a non-matriculated student and in the meantime beef up his resume by volunteering somewhere.
His vocation doesn’t have to start now. Right now, he has a million different paths he can take and if he doesn’t like one path, he can backtrack and start over. At the very least, there’s always next year. People have become successful under much worse situations.
Your brother may receive an acceptance letter tomorrow, for all you know! Just keep being there for him like you’re doing.
I feel the need to weigh in on this only because my office is in the process of hiring two attorneys (one entry-level, one lateral hire) and for those two positions we have now received some 190 resumes. And while the office I work in is beyond awesome, it’s not sexy – county government work. So I’m getting to talk to a lot of people, and I also remember well trying to get into graduate school and then trying to get those first few jobs after I got done.
In my field – and in my office – you are expected to be able to demonstrate some interest in the particular postion you’re seeking. It’s best if that interest is not just words coming out of your mouth, but experience you’ve actually bothered to garner. You like family law, and you’ve worked as a court liason volunteer? Fabulous! You like poverty law, and you volunteered to help low-income people fill out housing forms? Great! What, you say you want to litigate, which of course you never have because you’re still in school? Ah, but you’re on your moot court team, and you were a debater through college? Wonderful.
Since it seems to have escaped you (if not your brother), the job interview, or school interview, is not really the place to be your unvarnished self. You do not want to present the true you – the real you! – you want to present the candidate they are going to want to hire (or let in). This doesn’t mean you’ve sold your soul to the devil, but it does mean that you have bothered to try to garner the experience they are looking for. So, yeah, you put in some time down at the old folks’ home. Or you work in a doctor’s office. Or you study to be an EMT. You want your resume to say He can do this type of work, because he’s already done it and He’s sure this is the direction he wants to go in, because he’s already headed that way and He’s responsible and hardworking and meets his commitments.
And if you get an interview, you continue to present the candidate they want to see. This is not “sucking up,” it’s showing what an asset you’ll be to their office or school. How can you show that, if you disdain to demonstrate the qualities you think they’re looking for? Even if your brother never wants to touch a live person in his entire medical career, there’s a way to spin that without making a liar of himself: You play up your strengths and downplay your weaknesses: “I tend to be a pretty analytical thinker and reseach is what really draws me. But of course I recognize the importance of making sure the patients are comfortable and understand what’s going on . . . .”
The problem with “This is me! Take it or leave it!” is that the answer can so easily be “We’ll leave it, thanks.” This goes not just for school and career, but in our personal lives as well.
Nobody owes it to your brother to let him in to medical school. If he has lacked the foresight to position himself optimally for admission, and he refuses to “sell himself” a little to get in – well, he shouldn’t be surprised to be rejected.
I wish him the best of luck, but I also hope he comes across in person as a little more personable than you’ve described him.
And just as a general rule of thumb:
The pitfall in concluding that you didn’t get the job or school admission because “It’s all in who you know” or “They’re looking for ass-kissers/ liars/ fakers, and punished me because I’m not one” or “They’re predujiced against me because I’m the wrong [whatever]” – in other words, the pitfall in concluding that the problem is “them” and not “you” – is that it relieves you (general you) of responsibility for the results of your own actions or behaviors. And consequently you don’t change those actions or behaviors, and consequently you continue to get the same results. If you aren’t willing to admit that the problem might be with you, how are you going to fix it in the (very likely) event it is with you?
But it’s way easier to conclude that the universe is unfair, there’s collusion against you personally, or “The System” is just keeping you down, or whatever. That way you don’t have to consider whether there’s some changes that you might make that could improve your performance or chances going forward.
Humm - I get the impression (from this thread anyway) that Canadian medical schools are more competitive than those in the US (excepting the ivy league schools of course) if only because we have less to apply to. My school isn’t even outrageously competitive academicly from a Canadian perspective.
(We take candidates with lower GPAs - 3.6’s and the like - I’m not sure someone with a 3.6 is even alowed to APPLY to somewhere like U of T or McGill).
I interview students for medical school, for the MD/PhD program. Our average is over 34 MCAT and over 3.8 GPA. As alice_in_wonderland said, we don’t bat an eye until we see 14s or 15s. We face similar numbers: as an AMCAS school, we get over 3000 applications for 170 spots.
For MD/PhD, I had three years lab experience, hospital volunteer work, a 3.8 GPA with a cum laude BS in molecular biology, a thirty fuckin’ nine on the MCAT (with a 15 in bio, biatches). Guess what. Didn’t get into my first choice school’s program. Only got into my second choice’s program off of the wait list. So suck it. Especially in a shit economy, there are lots of people applying for medical school.
When we interview people, we turn away candidates with those numbers every day. In fact, once you get an interview, you leave your numbers at the door. Unless you can convince two faculty members and a med student that you want to be a doctor (keep in mind that the people you are convincing usually want or have patient contact) you ain’t getting in. We see a lot of great research scientists with papers and years in labs. We love them, but they often run into the buzz saw of medical school admissions. Why? They can’t convince the med school that they want to be doctors.
The med school is quite aware that there are plenty of other options for those kinds of people. Your brother wants to do research? Go get a PhD. He can walk into a PhD program in biological sciences. Your brother doesn’t want patient contact and has no interest in talking to people? He will never ever make it through medical school and residency. If he wants to be a surgeon, it will be 5 years at very minimum after admission that he will pick up a scalpel. Those 5 yeras are 5 years of taking histories and performing physicals, which is the integral skill taught by medical schools. At times it is highly unpleasant both physically and mentally – medical school is after all quite stressful, what with all of that memorizing textbooks and shit. He just won’t get through it if he starts off hating the integral lesson of medical school.
Oh, and if he didn’t get into an in-state school, there is no chance that he is going to get into a Texas school (the UT. A&M, and Texas Tech schools have already matched this year and Baylor College of Medicine had its last interview date last weekend and has rolling admissions all spring) or California schools (the UC schools take next to no-one from out-of-state). His best bet is a private school with no state affiliation (which will cost big bucks).
Best to wait for next year and reapply. Sucks but hey. My guess is that if he goes and works as an OR tech or volunteers in an ER or in a cancer ward somewhere for the year (as well as maybe finding a research job to see if he is interested in that – there are plenty of biology labs where a math degree would be of great use) he will be much more attractive. Give it a year. If the year of volunteer work does him in, so much the better. Go to grad school. We are all better off without doctors who can’t stand treating patients.
I’m taking a little break from studying for Pathology and Microbiology finals next week, I’m in the 4th year of a 6 year medical degree, so I can give my 2 cents.
Interview technique is not a minor thing, and if your brother can’t do interviews, he’s screwed.
Why?
Because his entire medical career consists of interviewing patients and explaining clinical decisions and scenarios to colleagues and families. Many of his clinical exams will be viva voce, i.e. interview style oral exams.
Being a doctor is also about putting on a face for your patients. No matter how exhausted you are, how much you dislike the patient, or how hopeless you feel their case to be, you have to exude confidence and forge a bond with them and their families. If he can’t show willling to do that in the admission interview, they will assume he is unwilling to do it a 3am with the family of an alcoholic dying of liver failure.
And patient exposure needn’t be anything much, working as an orderly or nurses aide in a hospital or nursing home one or two nights a week would go a long way…and might help pay off some of those debts.
It sounds as if he’s not willing to go that extra mile to show them why he wants to be a Doctor, rather than a research scientist or academic. It’s a fixable situation as interview technique and work experince can be acquired, but he really needs to think about whether he wants to do this.
And if he hasn’t read House of God by Samuel Shem, he should.
No matter whether he wants to go into research eventually or not, the path to get there is a long one, with many patients along the way. Patients he could kill and injure. Patients who can sue for millions. That’s what the admission people have in their minds when they choose candidates, and that’s why they choose the ones with experince with patients and good interview skills.
The academic side of medicine isn’t that hard. I hate to break it to you, but the academic side is easy compared to all the other stuff. Most reasonably intelligent people could master the basics without much trouble.
Nobody cares if their doctor came in top of his class if he’s an asshole.
I’m sure your brother will be delighted that a collection of total strangers across the globe are now better versed in his future career options than he is.
:rolleyes:
How’d we go from some dude telling how his brother didn’t “fake like he was a super loving person” during a medical school interview, to saying that his brother is an asshole? We know next to nothing of his brother. He could be the nicest guy in the world, but someone who just doesn’t care to do charity work. I dunno. Let’s not pile it on somebody who can’t be here to defend himself.
(Anybody else open this thread thinking it was about man-on-institution fetishes?)
Another doctor type chiming in, old enough to have a kid just on the other side of college apps …
The better med schools are looking to build teams of students. There is a place in the class for the math nerd with little interest or ability to communicate, but they don’t want a class of them, nor should they. Probably that niche in that med school class was filled by some other math nerd with even better scores or who also demonstrated some breadth of interests and expertise. Or if he was trying for that most likely to be the stellar future medical researcher spot then who had a few articles published while undergrad or some stellar reference letter from a known research advisor in whose lab he had spent oodles of hours.
It is true that you want to produce doctors who can memorize lots of facts; good grades and test scores are important. But all med schools look for more than some formulaic combination of grades, score, and class rank.
They care what school those grades came out of.
They care how well you can communicate. Communication skills matters in research too, you know. And despite the stereotype of surgeons, even they need to be more than technically expert. Look at any rant on this board about doctors and 9 to 1 the patient type’s anger would have been minimal if the dipwad doctor just communicated better and/or gave a shit.
Critical thinking skills are imperative. No one can know enough to be a compentent doctor; the skill you need above all others is to know that. Once you know that you need to be able to access others who know what you do not.
They care that you seem to give a shit. Only a small fraction of docs will never have patient contact. Sure some applicants can fake empathy, but most interviewers can tell who is insincere.
You need to have the skills to manage the degrees of uncertainty.
They care that you have some other interest that makes you special and that you bring to the mix. Could be art, music, poetry, social activism, community work … but something that shows a spark more than a grade grubber.
Some very smart people are lousy docs because they lack those skills or traits. Maybe your brother has those skills or the potential to develop them. But if the interviewer didn’t see it, then even superb scores and grades might not be enough. Assuming adequately good grades, each of the above is more important than having best grades.
Glad he has a brother who cares so much about him though.
No, but I was all set to point out that there tends to be precious little fucking in med school, especially once the ob/gyn/peds rotations start.