What do medical school admissions look for (in a person)?

December 11, 2011 6:45 AM

What do medical school admissions look for (in a person)?

Good grades, volunteer work, and experience aside, what does medical school admissions actually look for quality wise in a person?

I've been given an opportunity to tailor my own letter of recommendation by a professor and would like to hit points that medical school actively seek out.

posted by telsa to Education (7 answers total)

My mother has been on the medical school admissions committee at the university where she works, and these are some of the things she's told me about candidates they do and don't like:

--It's okay to have some fuckups, but you need to show that you've overcome them and changed yourself. So, if you had a bad semester at school, be sure to talk about why that was and what you did to change. If you had a DUI once, be sure to explain how that woke you up to reality and how you changed your behavior. In general, they seemed to like evidence that people made mistakes and learned from them.

--Real human connections. If you've done volunteer work, or any kind of work, be sure to talk about the people you worked with, not just that you did X number of hours and these kinds of tasks. For instance, my mother says they once interviewed someone who'd worked at a nursing home for all of college, but he didn't have a single specific story about a resident there. He had great grades and test scores, but he didn't seem to have any human touch.

--Compassion (see above).

The people she's talked about not admitting, all other things being equal, are the ones who have, say, multiple arrests on their record and never mention it anywhere and the ones who don't seem to have any demonstrated desire to help people. Good luck!
posted by newrambler at 7:12 AM on December 11, 2011

Being a good person and good stress-management skills. Your professor should touch on how you were considerate to other students in the classroom and were always willing to learn from or help somebody. Maybe a story about how you kept your cool when you could have gotten really angry?
posted by 200burritos at 7:18 AM on December 11, 2011

I helped a few med students write their application letters (successfully!) so I did some research on this once.

I'd summarize what you want to show as: grounded, rational, level-headed.

That is, if your personal presentation screams "Fragile, flighty ADD student" you are not helping yourself. Just like Miss America, everyone might say that they "want to help people" or somesuch, but that review board needs to find students who can actually survive med school first, and med school is, well, really freaking hard on a person.

Also, and this might sound cynical, but I have come to believe that they also really like it if there have been other doctors in your family, or at least that you have had as role models growing up. House doesn't count.
posted by rokusan at 9:21 AM on December 11, 2011

Working well as part of a team is a major part of success in a medical career, and so I always mention teamwork as a part of my letter of rec if the candidate has that skill.

If you did teaching in any context, they like that. We teach our patients every day, no matter what kind of physician.

I think to elaborate on what rokusan said, I don't think it's just that they like it if there are doctors in your family, but they like to know that you know what the lifestyle of a doctor is like, that you have spent a good amount of time considering this decision and have a real idea of what the job is going to entail. Shadowing in an academic medical center is really important for you (not just for the medical school admissions committee but just so you know what you're getting yourself into before you're tens of thousands of dollars deep in debt! It can also be emotionally and physically draining and eventually almost everyone gets burnt out and starts dreaming of what life would have been like if they did something else). That's why they like any in depth exposure to the medical profession you've had, and it makes sense.
posted by treehorn+bunny at 9:28 AM on December 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

p.s. with your extracurriculars/volunteer work, it's good if you had a sustained commitment/participation and really cared about what you were doing, rather than just superficial participation in many activities, which makes you look like you were just trying to buff up your resume.

i.e. you tutored after school for years and eventually took a leadership position coordinating the program, is a very different volunteer experience than you went to help out at a soup kitchen on Christmas one time.
posted by treehorn+bunny at 9:31 AM on December 11, 2011

It took me years to realize this, but the point of all those ridiculous-seeming extra-curriculars and hobbies you're supposed to have is not quite that you're a sharp-shooter AND Olympic gymnast AND volunteer in 50 soup kitchens AND a pre-med, and not so much that you're a saint at a young age (although that helps), but it proves that you were able to handle the workload of being a pre-med AND still have time and energy left over to do other things. If pre-med took 100% of your effort, one might wonder if you have the reserves for the progressively harder stages of medical training, or so the thinking seems to go. (I mention it because framing it that way made it easier for me to sell those properly in my application).

Sustained commitment to a few activities probably does look better than a brief involvement with many.

Stress management, conflict management, and ability to work well with others are perennial favorite interview questions, so they're good things to mention in a letter of recommendation.

(On preview: what they said)
posted by vetala at 10:28 AM on December 11, 2011

Here's what the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons in Canada thinks a good doctor should be:
CanMeds Roles [PDF].

See if you can maybe incorporate some of these roles in your letter.
posted by reformedjerk at 10:45 AM on December 11, 2011