This. Sports is only advantageous if you’re recruitable. If you haven’t had discussions with coaches already, you’re probably not.
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You can take the required courses for medical school applicants at just about every four year college in this country, arts conservatories excluded. And you can do shadowing, etc during school breaks and in the summer. There are opportunities to volunteer with less privileged populations at just about every college.
Medical schools will cost $100,000 a year of more by the time you get there…if you do. The structure of federally funded direct loans has changed with the aggregate amount limit (including undergrad) at $200,000. So those federally funded loans won’t cover four years if medical school costs. Please keep that in mind.
Bs/MD programs are highly highly competitive and should all be in your reach list categorization.
I don’t think “virtual shadowing” will be highly regarded by those BS MD programs. @WayOutWestMom can tell me if I’m correct.
At this point, I would suggest you put medical school ideas on hold. Your goal right now is to find undergrad programs where you can see yourself being happy for four years, at least one where you are pretty much guaranteed acceptance, and that are affordable (preferably without loans).
You should also be thinking about a Plan B which every medical school aspirant needs to have.
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I agree with @thumper1, “virtual” shadowing is pretty worthless in the eyes of adcomms since it doesn’t get close to the actual experience of a clinical setting with the smells of patients and the hours of paperwork. So unless this was done during Covid, I wouldn’t even mention it.
For a premed, having a budget is important. With the new changes to the federal loan program, it’s going to be harder to finance med school than ever before, especially if you borrow money for undergrad.
Also, no pre med program anywhere provides these types of opportunities for pre-med. An advisor isn’t going to send out a email that says Prof X is looking for a student to help in his lab. Or that nearby Dr. Q is accepting students to shadow in his practice. Finding opportunities is the student’s job.
Nearly every college in the country will have volunteering opportunities in the area.
Again, getting into med school isn’t a feature of the undergrad you attend–it’s a function of how good of an applicant you, the student, are. You have to have the grades, the test scores, strong LORs, the right ECs, excellent writing skills..
You may see certain colleges or universities boasting about their med school acceptances rates, but any data from the school is highly biased and not to be trusted. Undergrads manipulate their matriculation number in dozens of ways that aren’t obvious to high school students. The most obvious on is the use of a pre-med committee that screens out any applicant the committee believe doesn’t have an excellent chance of getting a med school acceptance. But there many others as well.
Also, one of my daughter s graduated from Rochester. She was an undecided pre-med (trying to decide between MD, MD/PhD or PhD), who ended up going MD after a gap year working at a Top 10 med school. If you have any questions about the school, I am happy to answer them. Send me a DM.
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