November 19, 2006
This is the beginning of my blog. As of today, I have been offered admission to 5 medical schools in the U.S., 4 of which are top-ranked (1 is a "Top 5" ranked school). I haven't yet decided which school to attend, but I feel extremely fortunate and incredibly blessed.
Because of this recent luck, I have been asked by many friends and family to talk about how exactly I got accepted to medical school. Many of them are just curious, while others would like to know how they, too, can gain acceptance to a top medical school.
I've decided to make this blog as a response to these requests. Questions I hope to answer here include:
- How have I become so fortunate as to be where I am now?
- Am I a genius? (No way.)
- Is there anything special about me? (Probably my MCAT and GPA.)
- How did I prepare for the MCAT? (Well, I will tell you!)
- How did I get my GPA? (I'll tell you that too!)
Bookmark this site if you are just curious about the medical schools admission process, or if you think what I have to say might be of any help to you. I'll write as much as I can here, as often as I can. Stay tuned!
See you soon!
How to ace the MCAT: Part 1 - scheduling
November 21, 2006
Let me just come out and say that I scored extremely well on the MCAT. My 40+ score was in the 99th percentile of all medical school applicants, and I feel this gave me a huge advantage in getting interviews with medical schools. I mean, with an MCAT score in the top 1% of the applicant pool, there is no way your application won't stand out.
Yet given this score, I don't consider myself to be a genius or anything. I think anyone who is moderately smart could have scored as high as I did. I also don't think I studied harder than anyone else. In fact, I spent a little less than 2 months studying for the April MCAT while being a full-time undergraduate, versus most of my friends, who studied for 4-5 months or who did nothing but MCAT studying for an entire summer. And I still managed to score higher than 99% of all medical school applicants, including all of my hard-working friends. How did this happen?
My theory is that I just studied smarter. I accomplished this in 3 ways: 1) scheduling, 2) study materials, and 3) test-taking techniques. In this blog entry, I'll be talking about #1: scheduling.
I started studying for the MCAT early, but not too early. A lot of people think that the more you study, the better. But I disagree with this. Let me just say first off that given the nature of the test and the huge amount of information you are responsible for knowing, there is no way you can cram for the MCAT in a week. You will need to spread out the studying to a gradual pace. BUT there is also no reason for you to spend four or five months studying for the MCAT. I did two months, and I feel like that was just enough.
I think there are many downfalls to starting too early. The first is that you'll be burnt out by the time test day rolls around. Second, you probably won't remember much of what you studied more than 2 months ago anyway (can you recall all the information from a class you took last semester? I certainly can't). And third, you'll just be wasting your time if you start too early. There's not much benefit in reviewing the material more than once, and the extra time you waste in going over it one more time could have been spent doing something useful, like volunteering, exercising, sleeping, or having a life.
The important thing is not to study longer for the MCAT, but just to study smarter. During these two months, I set aside time each day specifically for MCAT studying; I treated it like a class with solid deadlines and daily assignments. I would stay up late to finish the "assigned" reading to meet the deadlines of my schedule rather than slack off if I didn't feel like doing the work. I didn't put in a whole lot of time each day for studying, but I was consistent. I spent at least 1 hour a day on MCAT-related stuff, every day. And it paid off.
And by treating the MCAT like another class, I didn't devote an unreasonable amount of time to it, either too much or too little. I was able to tuck it neatly into my full-time undergraduate course load (16 credits worth of real classes) without falling behind or getting overwhelmed.
So that's my timeline for you - two months in advance, at least 1 hour per day (I increased this to 3 or 4 hours a day the two weeks right before the exam). In my next post, I'll talk about what materials I used, and in a following post, I'll discuss which test-taking techniques I found most helpful.
See you soon!
Let me just come out and say that I scored extremely well on the MCAT. My 40+ score was in the 99th percentile of all medical school applicants, and I feel this gave me a huge advantage in getting interviews with medical schools. I mean, with an MCAT score in the top 1% of the applicant pool, there is no way your application won't stand out.
Yet given this score, I don't consider myself to be a genius or anything. I think anyone who is moderately smart could have scored as high as I did. I also don't think I studied harder than anyone else. In fact, I spent a little less than 2 months studying for the April MCAT while being a full-time undergraduate, versus most of my friends, who studied for 4-5 months or who did nothing but MCAT studying for an entire summer. And I still managed to score higher than 99% of all medical school applicants, including all of my hard-working friends. How did this happen?
My theory is that I just studied smarter. I accomplished this in 3 ways: 1) scheduling, 2) study materials, and 3) test-taking techniques. In this blog entry, I'll be talking about #1: scheduling.
I started studying for the MCAT early, but not too early. A lot of people think that the more you study, the better. But I disagree with this. Let me just say first off that given the nature of the test and the huge amount of information you are responsible for knowing, there is no way you can cram for the MCAT in a week. You will need to spread out the studying to a gradual pace. BUT there is also no reason for you to spend four or five months studying for the MCAT. I did two months, and I feel like that was just enough.
I think there are many downfalls to starting too early. The first is that you'll be burnt out by the time test day rolls around. Second, you probably won't remember much of what you studied more than 2 months ago anyway (can you recall all the information from a class you took last semester? I certainly can't). And third, you'll just be wasting your time if you start too early. There's not much benefit in reviewing the material more than once, and the extra time you waste in going over it one more time could have been spent doing something useful, like volunteering, exercising, sleeping, or having a life.
The important thing is not to study longer for the MCAT, but just to study smarter. During these two months, I set aside time each day specifically for MCAT studying; I treated it like a class with solid deadlines and daily assignments. I would stay up late to finish the "assigned" reading to meet the deadlines of my schedule rather than slack off if I didn't feel like doing the work. I didn't put in a whole lot of time each day for studying, but I was consistent. I spent at least 1 hour a day on MCAT-related stuff, every day. And it paid off.
And by treating the MCAT like another class, I didn't devote an unreasonable amount of time to it, either too much or too little. I was able to tuck it neatly into my full-time undergraduate course load (16 credits worth of real classes) without falling behind or getting overwhelmed.
So that's my timeline for you - two months in advance, at least 1 hour per day (I increased this to 3 or 4 hours a day the two weeks right before the exam). In my next post, I'll talk about what materials I used, and in a following post, I'll discuss which test-taking techniques I found most helpful.
See you soon!
How to ace the MCAT: Part 2 - study materials
November 22, 2006
While some of my friends preferred to sign up for a Kaplan prep course, I decided to just study on my own. I felt that it would be much more efficient this way. Here are some of the ways I envisioned a Kaplan course would waste my time and money:
- I would have to spend at least an hour each day just getting to and from the class site (20 minutes driving to class + 20 minutes driving home + 10 minutes parking and walking). This is an extra hour each day I could have been studying!
- Class time would invariably be wasted each day for the following purposes: 1) the instructor introducing him/herself to the class, 2) the instructor asking questions to the class, with no one volunteering an answer, resulting in awkward and wasted silence, 3) the instructor speaking more slowly than I could read
- Tuition for a Kaplan course is ridiculously expensive: $1649!! I ended up buying review books online for less than $300, saving at least $1,200!
The books I bought online were basically miscellaneous Kaplan and Examkrackers review books. It's basically not too important which study materials you use (all the review books were pretty much the same), but rather how you use them. I read quickly through the books just once. Sure, it was tempting to pore back and forth through each chapter, memorizing every little detail, but with the sheer volume of pages, I felt that this simply was not a smart thing to do. There was no way I could do that in the limited time that I had, and memorization was just not physically possible for me when there was such a huge amount of information to absorb. So, I sprinted through all of the books and didn't look back.
I used the practice questions included in each of the books to review and apply what I just read. I found that the questions were very close to questions on the real MCAT.
While some of my friends preferred to sign up for a Kaplan prep course, I decided to just study on my own. I felt that it would be much more efficient this way. Here are some of the ways I envisioned a Kaplan course would waste my time and money:
- I would have to spend at least an hour each day just getting to and from the class site (20 minutes driving to class + 20 minutes driving home + 10 minutes parking and walking). This is an extra hour each day I could have been studying!
- Class time would invariably be wasted each day for the following purposes: 1) the instructor introducing him/herself to the class, 2) the instructor asking questions to the class, with no one volunteering an answer, resulting in awkward and wasted silence, 3) the instructor speaking more slowly than I could read
- Tuition for a Kaplan course is ridiculously expensive: $1649!! I ended up buying review books online for less than $300, saving at least $1,200!
The books I bought online were basically miscellaneous Kaplan and Examkrackers review books. It's basically not too important which study materials you use (all the review books were pretty much the same), but rather how you use them. I read quickly through the books just once. Sure, it was tempting to pore back and forth through each chapter, memorizing every little detail, but with the sheer volume of pages, I felt that this simply was not a smart thing to do. There was no way I could do that in the limited time that I had, and memorization was just not physically possible for me when there was such a huge amount of information to absorb. So, I sprinted through all of the books and didn't look back.
I used the practice questions included in each of the books to review and apply what I just read. I found that the questions were very close to questions on the real MCAT.
Part III: Test-taking strategies
December 20, 2006
In truth, this process all boils down to eight hours of your life – you may prepare for months beforehand and know all of the material backwards and forwards, but if something goes wrong during the 8 hours of test day, all of your work yields nothing. (Now granted, I took the paper version of the test, and that was 8 hours – I've heard the new computer version may be shorter.) So, in addition to learning all of the biology, physics, and chemistry for the MCAT, I also prepped for the actual day:
- I got plenty of sleep. Test day began early, and I made sure I didn't wake up a zombie.
- I ate breakfast to build up energy for the first part of the exam.
- I dressed comfortably. The exam required me to sit for a LONG time. I wore sweats and a T-shirt and felt pretty relaxed.
- I didn't do anything that I wouldn't normally do (ie, drink coffee). I was afraid of any unexpected consequences of changing my routine.
- I made sure not to have any turkey for lunch (turkey has tryptophan, which makes you sleepy.)
Now, on to my strategies for the actual exam.
- I underlined and circled key words in passages and questions – not so much to highlight important concepts, but more to keep focused. My mind tends to wander ("Whoa! I'm taking the MCAT! I'm awfully hungry. And thirsty. This girl in front of me keeps tapping her foot. Please stop tapping your foot!"), so this was necessary for me to do.
- Because time is a limiting factor, I didn't dwell on questions that I couldn't figure out the answer to. I made my best educated guess and moved on. I figured that missing one question would be much better than missing the last 5 or 6 because I ran out of time.
- My Kaplan friends recommended a strategy they had been taught in the course – "triaging." Basically, in triaging, you quickly scan different passages and then do the easiest ones first to rack up points. For once, I did find a Kaplan strategy useful, and I used this strategy on my exam. (I am not sure if you would be able to do this with the computer version, though…does the computer let you skip around?)
- I took a deep breath after each passage. I sometimes found that when I began a new passage, I would think back to the previous passage. By taking a deep breath, I helped myself "let go" of the previous passage, and this helped me to concentrate on the next one. So, by spending one second refocusing, I saved myself a whole bunch of time wasted re-reading sentences due to lack of focus.
If you find any of what I did useful, feel free to steal these strategies. Everyone has a different test-taking style, though, so if you don't think what I did would work for you, try to find what does work.
I'll be back in a few days to talk about what I did in college to keep my GPA up. See you soon!
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