My Thoughts/Questions/Plan

mcat2
Sat, 13 Aug 2011 12:02:36 +0000

started taking 16 hrs in junior year because of MCAT prep. and then Interviews in Senior year (which was so easy that she had a bit of hard time adjusting back to studying hard at Med. School.

Just a speculation here…This may point to one downside of having a gap year doing research in addition to the more relaxed senior year (for many college students, idk) In a gap year, you usually works along side with graduate students or career postdocs if your “work” is in an academic environment. Arguably speaking, these students (who rarely have any summer vacation so they do not slack off or anything like that, unless they have given up their tenure-track dream.) do not “study” in the same way as the undergraduate premeds do in terms of breadth or problem set/test-centric – They zoom into a very narrow area and specialize in it. They DO things in the lab much more than they read/memorize by going over books/problem sets. (I guess this is one reason why the grades of graduate classes are not valued in the same way as the grades of typical UG premed classes. Both graduate students and their students pay more attention to the research work than anything else.) I guess this is also not what MS1/2 usually do.

BTW, I heard some colleges will allow their junior/senior premed students to take semi-medical-school-like classes (likely at much slower pace) in those years, instead of the graduate-school-track preparation classes taught by the academia. But most higher-ranked schools will not allow their science students to do something like this. – Well, I probably should take this back. A year or so ago, a physician/parent who used to study in JHU university said JHU also has a major/track for “semi-science-major” students (like Stanford’s “human biology” major?) who are so much interested in academics but still want to go to a medical school.