#aacomas

Can’t believe it’s August already xD I’m about to resume my job but currently on a fun vacation with friends.

All my secondaries have been pretty much submitted, which took forever. That’s 14 MD secondaries and 12 DO secondaries submitted O.o I can’t believe I wrote that much. 

To much excitement, I’ve received 2 DO interview invites so far and will be attending them. So excited but quite nervous as well. Moving onto interview prep currently. Should I document how I prep for interviews or anything else? 

It’s application season! Gahh! Part of me was looking forward for it to open so i could finally fill everything out and play a different type of waiting came. Though opening it and doing it is a bit daunting itself. 

So for the past week, the medical student forms have been ablaze with the latest change: the elimination of the grade replacement policy for AACOMAS applications. Previously, if one made a bad grade in a class, they could retake the class later and get a higher grade to replace the lower one when it’s time to calculate your GPA. It was essentially a redo; the D you made in organic chemistry is replaced by the A you make when you retake it. They still see that you made the D but the A is incorporated in your GPA. This policy affects students applying for the upcoming cycle which starts in about 5 months. Now the policy is the same as for AMCAS GPA in which the original grade and the retake grade are averaged. 

I am not in DO school but I was a non-traditional student, which is why I care enough to talk about this problem. It makes me angry how this policy was put into place which such little notice. People have been spending so much money and time on retaking these classes over the past couple of years to apply DO because their GPA would be much higher with grade replacement. Yes, their GPA would go up some but not drastically enough to be competitive for admission or even get past the initial screen of 3.0. I have seen anecdotes of people having something like a 2.7 without replacement but a 3.5 with replacement.

I imagine that if people knew about this policy 1-2 years in advance, they might have changed their career trajectory. Maybe if they knew their GPA wouldn’t increase much, they wouldn’t shell out for special masters programs and other post-baccs. 

I personally feel that averaging the grades between retakes is a good policy to make it fairer for applicants but I think there should be at least 1 or 2 more cycles under the grade replacement policy. Or at least reduce the automatic screen (usually < 3.0 from what I’ve heard) lower so admission committees can see if you have extenuating circumstances to explain your GPA or so they can see an upward GPA trend in your coursework. 

Medical school admissions are brutal and I really don’t know what I would have done if I was in this situation.

Advertising #premed

Last semester was an interesting, and occasionally overwhelming challenge. Juggling all my various commitments was doable, but didn’t exactly give me the time to earn the grades I wanted or really focus on my secondary essays. Looking at my personal statement and comparing it to the the various secondary essays I wrote, I see can just about when I started to get what I’m going to call Secondary…

4 Tips on How to Make Your Student Loans Work FOR You

It’s once again that time of year for spring classes to start and for your long awaited financial aid disbursements to arrive. Perhaps you’re one of the lucky students to have extra financial aid leftover to spend. Instead of paying off credit cards or taking that trip, you might want to think first about how you can invest some of those funds in opportunities to increase your chances of becoming…

What To Do After Your Med School Interview

As we enter the beginning of 2016, most pre-med students have, hopefully, completed their med school interviews. We are at that point in time where a lot of you are anxiously awaiting that letter of acceptance. It may seem like there isn’t a lot you can do at this point to increase your chance of being admitted, but there are a couple things you can do to ease the pain of time passing slower than…