LAW STUDENT applying to medschool. Please help!

WayOutWestMom
Wed, 30 Sep 2020 19:26:13 +0000

Applying without any clinical experience? I would put your chances very near zero, if not actually zero.

Adcomms want to know why you want to be a doctor. In fact, you need to write a personal statement explaining this as part of your med school application. What are you going to say? I just know? What evidence can you offer than that you understand the kind of life you’re signing up for? How can you show that your most sincere desire is to spend the rest of their life ministering to the chronically ill, the elderly and demented, the physically disabled, the mentally ill, the acutely sick and dying and their families without actually having "walked the walk " through prior service?

In a 2017 AAMC survey of med school admission officers, adcomms ranked an applicant having clinical experience as “very important” when making decision about who to invite to interview and who to admit.

As it stands, without clinical experience (and physician shadowing and community service with the disadvantaged) it looks like you’re running AWAY from the law, not running TOWARDS medicine. Adcomms will be extremely skeptical of your new career goal.

BTW, if you hate reading & writing, you're wrong to believe that medicine will get you away from this. Physicians read constantly. Medicine and medical research is happening constantly. Physicians are always reading to keep current on new knowledge in their field.  And doctors are always writing--they write detailed treatment plans, they write justification for those treatment plans for insurers, they write patient notes, they write handoff notes....Documenting everything is a way of life for physicians.

RE: merit scholarship?

Merit for med school is rare and except for a handful ultra competitive schools, the amounts tend to be low. The median debt at med school graduation is around $220K. (And that’s skewed low since 18% of all newly graduated physicians report having no debt thanks to the Bank of Mom and Dad.)

Most med school are moving toward need based grant aid instead of merit (which tend to reward those coming from an upper and upper middle class professional background) as part of their programs to diversify their class make ups.

Now if you are a rock star applicant with multiple acceptances to top ranked med schools, then merit starts to become a possibility.

However, 60% of med school applicants don’t get any acceptances period, and 70% of those who do get accepted get a single acceptance.