Hello, to make this quick here are my stats:
2nd-semester sophomore:
good research, good nonclinical volunteering, good extracurriculars, good gpa with the only worry being about clinical volunteering experience.
Clinical Volunteering Experience: 1 Semester of Virtual Volunteering at Pediatric Residential Facility (10-15 hours accumulated)
1 Semester of Volunteering at a hospital (40 hours currently with at bare minimum when experience is completed 70 hours ). This extracurricular is at a very good hospital, but with Covid, the pre-med program I'm volunteering at has been reduced to just working at the front desk and checking in patients for surgery, making day passes for guests, and directing people at the hospital. It is also important to note that the program may implement a new program soon that will be much more clinically centered.
Plans: Study for the MCAT this Summer -> Take extremely difficult semester in the fall (pause mcat studying)-> Take much easier semester in the spring and resume studying for the mcat + take the mcat this spring -> the summer directly after taking the mcat, start applying to med school.
-- So right now, I want to avoid taking a gap year for family reasons. If I have to, I will, but again, I really want to avoid it. I recognize that my clinical volunteering experience will most likely be the weakest point of my application, and I am actively thinking about how to change that. What I have come up with is potentially becoming a scribe. Scribes -- from my understanding -- typically, work for 6-12 months. I have thought about beginning to scribe this summer until I apply to medical school, but I am not naive enough to realize that balancing too many things at once will only cause me to collapse. So reasonably, I think I can only scribe only after my MCAT completed -- this deduction implies that I can potentially scribe during my senior year.
If I were to scribe during my (junior year summer + senior year), then I can apply to medical school junior year summer or senior year summer. If I applied to medical school in junior year summer, I would not have a lot of hours in scribing and I'm not sure how this would affect my application. If I were to apply to medical school in senior year summer, my application would be the strongest, but it would force me to take a gap year which I would prefer not to do.
I believe I am stuck between a rock and a hard place and would appreciate your thoughts.
Note: I have also considered instead of studying for the MCAT for such a long duration, I can just take the MCAT this summer. I am not necessarily opposed to that idea, but I would not have taken biochem yet, and I'm not sure if that will severely damage my score. To be honest, knowledge-wise, I'm confident that I can self-teach it to myself because I am a chem major and have been really studying and doing well in uni, so my mcat studying won't be torture for the other subjects.
If i were to take the mcat this summer, my life becomes much simpler -- if I were to take it this summer, I can begin to scribe the spring of my junior year and apply to med school my junior year summer. This would solve a lot of my problems, but again, with the importance of the mcat, I do not want to take it lightly.
Thank you for reading this.
