Advising

I had a phone-meeting today with my old pre-med advisor from my Vanderbilt, to try and sort out a few questions that have been in my head. It was nice talking to someone from my old school, and it was nice to not have to talk to my current pre-med advisor at AU. She seems nice, but she's been having to deal with a lot lately: I think there have been some deaths in the family, and her pet dog got cancer and needed to have its leg amputated (This is the same dog I complained about her having in her office the first time I met her a year ago or so... which makes me feel pretty bad now). I'm sure the last thing she really wants to deal with is premed students coming to her and complaining about their - relatively trivial - dilemmas.

Anyways. Here are some of the things I found out.

• DC is the worst or second worst place to be in the US for applying to medical school, numbers wise (competing with California). Each state - and DC's - schools reserve a small number of seats for residents. DC has 3 Medical Schools, with 8 seats reserved total. There are usually ~65 applicants for those 8 seats, which leaves a 12% chance or so of getting in. It's a /little/ bit better, actually, since they'll have to accept around 12-15 people to ensure the seats get filled, so it's more like a 20% chance of getting into one of the three schools. Percentage wise, this number is as good as it will get. Out of state schools will be down towards 5-10%.
• I'll need around /five/ letters of recommendation. I'm a bit shocked by that, really - it's a lot. It's more than I was expecting. It's a good thing I went to some teacher's office hours last semester, or I'd be having a lot of trouble now. I can probably get at least one letter from an organization I've worked for (like my supervising charge-nurse at Georgetown Hospital, from when I volunteered there). Vanderbilt can provide me a cover letter, if I want, which is neat.
• My Grades are "ok", even from AU, but the MCAT is where I'll have to back it up, as I thought.
• Applying early is nice, but the benefits aren't going to outweigh doing better on the MCAT, even if just slightly. The problem - I'll have no idea how much extra time I'll need to study for the organic chemistry section of that test until it's a bit late. I might have to pick my MCAT date blindly, and hope for luck.
• Not having a ton of extracurriculars is sort of "ok", since I'm doing this out of law school instead of it having been my first path. I'll need a good explanation for leaving law school though (which is fine, I have one with the epilepsy... what's harder is explaining away my B- or so average in law school, which I'll need to show along with everything else. Uh oh.)
• MCAT scores: out of a possible 45 the national average is 26.1, the Vanderbilt student average is 29.9, and the average of students entering Vanderbilt's Medical school is 34.5, which is also the average for most of the other tops US medical schools (Harvard is 35.7, John Hopkins is 35.4, and Georgetown is 31.8. ... And just for the sake of including it since I went there for law, Emory Medical School's average entering MCAT score is 34.5 also). It's hard to list the minimum averages for other schools, since the number gets artificially lowered at state schools who reserve more slots for their applicants. 27-30 is probably a reasonable average for the lower end.

Right now, I'm leaning towards taking the April MCAT if at all possible. It will be nice to get to apply early, even if it doesn't help much, and it would be nice for schools with rolling admissions. It would also provide some buffer room for people sending in their letters of recommendation late, or what not, so the whole process would be a bit less stressful.

I'm not sure how I'll get my 5 letters of rec, how I'll "fix" physics, and how I'll explain away my bad average in law school. Luckily, I still have some time to work on that all. And I still have time to (hopefully) grab one more extracurricular between now and the time I apply.

As far as regular academic work goes, I'm staying busy. I have to get a lab report done up tonight (it's awful only having one day to work on them, because our labs are so close together w/ the summer schedule...), but I think the instructor will grade it gently. Next week, I have to take a "midterm" in Lab (not entirely sure what it is, but it's worth a bunch of my lab grade....) and a real exam on Wednesday. I'll be pretty busy this weekend studying for that, but I'm confidant I can get it done well.

It's hard to believe this course is half over already.