<p>Mike and BigRedMed: What an informational exchange, I’m definitely learning a lot–thanks.</p>
<p>WHS: clearly you don’t realize the value in a complete undergraduate education. There’s so much more to getting into medical school than taking the prereqs and doing well on the MCAT. Medicine is not a vocational degree. As an above poster mentioned, most of what you’re doing as an undergrad is preparing you for the process and the practice of learning medicine, not so much the actual material you need (as you’ve noticed with your physician friends). </p>
<p>Among other things like prereqs, you need time to do research, volunteer, work in a clinical setting, shadow, get involved, manage your time well. You need to grow up and mature and learn how to live on your own as a young adult. You need to learn to think critically like an adult, and adult who wants to become a doctor. You probably need to experience some deep, profound pain to give all the awesome things in your life meaningful context. You need to work with other people. You need to be a problem solver. I would say without hesitation that the majority of the learning I did in college was not in a classroom. It’s learning about yourself and growing up as a result. Why you think you would be a competent physician without that is beyond me. </p>
<p>The few people I know who are applying without a bachelor’s and with only 90 hours of credit have not fared well this application cycle. Each of them (there’s 4) has great stats–34/3.9 or better–yet none has picked up an acceptance yet. Most have attributed this to the fact that they just lack the life experience students just one year older clearly have. As a senior who considers herself to be pretty mature anyway, I often felt intimidated by the other people interviewing at my schools (Northwestern, Mayo, Duke) simply because many of them were older and thus had had the time to experience so many more things than I have.</p>
<p>Why have you completely disregarded the value of growing up in college?</p>