Well, it looks like I'm going to get to drag out my premed adventure after all, for better or worse.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about what to do with myself now, and have had a chance to talk to my advisers to get their thoughts as well. The good news is that based on my GPA alone, they think I have a reasonable shot at getting into a medical school somewhere. So based on that it doesn't seem to make much sense for me to up and quit.
The bad news is that medical schools (in general) won't look at only my highest MCAT score. Different schools have different ways of dealing with applicants who have multiple MCAT scores, but the most common is to take an average of the scores. So if I take the MCAT now as scheduled and do badly, it becomes something that's very hard (perhaps impossible) to really fix.
Further bad news, obviously, is that if I don't take the MCAT now I'm applying next year, and not this one. More postponement makes for a frustrating situation.
Further good news though - I'm able to take the MCAT in September or so if I want, I don't have to wait a whole year to take it. I'll still not get to apply this year, but at least that would give me a solid score much much sooner, and would let me have a good idea of if I could get into a school much much sooner (once I have my combined GPA and MCAT score, it largely turns into a statistical exercise; interviews and essays are important too, but I think I have a pretty good motivation/story and am convinced those would only help me).
Taking the exam in September gives me a respectable four to five months to study. If that's not enough time, it's a safe bet that spending a whole year wouldn't get the job done either. Plus, if it was in a year it would be easier to procrastinate. It's harder for me to get concerned about events that distant.
So I'm going to think another day or so, but it looks like this is the current plan. I'll try to get an interesting/medically relevant job as well, to boost my resume some more too. Hopefully a paying job. My first shot is to try working as a medical scribe somewhere again. It seems like a really neat job, and pays, and is different from what I've been doing to date. It didn't work last time, but this time I have a bit of a better resume, and I can commit a solid amount of time to it if I know I'm not running off to medical school next year. Other choices are less interesting to me, or unpaid, or seem difficult to get without knowing people. I'll give this a shot first and see what happens.
