Ask AdmissionsConsultants

[AdmissionsConsultants]

Dear Preeti,

While we appreciate your questions, we are unable to answer them here. This is a medical school admissions thread. We answer brief questions to help admissionsboards.com’s members, display our expertise, and provide members with an idea of our capabilities should they be interested in securing our comprehensive services to maximize their admissions chances.

Your questions are about dental school admissions and they are outside Dr. Workman’s area of expertise.

Best regards,

David Petersam

AdmissionsConsultants
703.242.5885

[cerebral]

Hello,
I have a few questions and i hope you can help me.

I am currently a fourth year at an osteopathic school and I am dissatisfied. I am not interested in representing this aspect of medicine. I am interested in returning to a traditional allopathic (MD) school. I have done fine in my undegraduate experience. Avg GPA,AVG Board scores (COMLEX). I have also taken USMLE II and passed.

1.I am interested in knowing if I would have to take the MCAT again to be accepted into the first year? I do not mind starting all over. Have you heard of anyone doing this? Aside from the financial issue I wanted to know your thoughts as to if this was possible.

[rworkman]

This is the first time I’ve heard of a senior osteopathic student who is willing to start from scratch in an allopathic school. You must be extremely dissatisfied, and I wonder why you did not pursue a change earlier in your osteopathic education. I believe having already taken and passed USMLE step II precludes you from going back and starting again….however, I am not 100% sure of this. I would recommend talking with one of your counselors to be absolutely sure.

As a DO you are able to train in any specialty you choose. The MD and DO are interchangeable. I’m not sure I understand what it is you feel you are lacking at this point.

Best regards,

Ron Workman, MD
AdmissionsConsultants
(703) 242-5885

[cerebral]

quote:

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Originally posted by rworkman

This is the first time I’ve heard of a senior osteopathic student who is willing to start from scratch in an allopathic school. You must be extremely dissatisfied, and I wonder why you did not pursue a change earlier in your osteopathic education. I believe having already taken and passed USMLE step II precludes you from going back and starting again….however, I am not 100% sure of this. I would recommend talking with one of your counselors to be absolutely sure.

As a DO you are able to train in any specialty you choose. The MD and DO are interchangeable. I’m not sure I understand what it is you feel you are lacking at this point.

---

To answer your question there are a few reasons.
My initial reason for chosing D.O. had to do with what I beleived to be a more holistic approach and more human approach to medicine (which depends completely on the physician regardless of degree..something I found out a bit late). I did attempt to transfer but it is a very difficult thing to do and only a few are actually successful.

To be honest I had no issues defending D.O. principles until I encountered certain practices not rooted in evidence based medicine which started my dissatisfaction. Although the two degrees are interchangeble I would feel more comfortable if I pursued the traditional path. I can no longer defend what I no longer believe.

I will check with a counselor concerning USMLE II and if that prevents an individual from enrolling in an allopathic school.
Although this would be an expensive path I am willing to pursue it.
Thank you for your input.

[ggoldmakher]

quote:

---

Originally posted by brandonw_395

AdmissionsConsultants,

I really like the website and your advice. I am 30 years old. Am I too old to try and realize my dreams of becoming an MD? What kind of help do you provide and what are your charges?

---

To add to Dr. Workman’s reply, I’d like to say that there is even an advantage of sorts to applying to med school later in life. Someone who has been out in the working world and developed another career, and then decided to switch to medicine, tends to have a much clearer idea of why it is that they want to go into medicine than the average student just out of college. They also tend to be more mature and focused. I had classmates in medical school who had been lawyers, accountants, housewives, pilots, marketing execs, and so forth before deciding to pursue a medical career.

Don’t let your age deter you. If you feel the calling to be a physician, go for it.

Gregory Goldmakher, MD, PhD

AdmissionsConsultants
703.242.5885

[thymol_blue]

quote:

---

Originally posted by cerebral

quote:

---

Originally posted by rworkman

This is the first time I’ve heard of a senior osteopathic student who is willing to start from scratch in an allopathic school. You must be extremely dissatisfied, and I wonder why you did not pursue a change earlier in your osteopathic education. I believe having already taken and passed USMLE step II precludes you from going back and starting again….however, I am not 100% sure of this. I would recommend talking with one of your counselors to be absolutely sure.

As a DO you are able to train in any specialty you choose. The MD and DO are interchangeable. I’m not sure I understand what it is you feel you are lacking at this point.

---

To answer your question there are a few reasons.
My initial reason for chosing D.O. had to do with what I beleived to be a more holistic approach and more human approach to medicine (which depends completely on the physician regardless of degree..something I found out a bit late). I did attempt to transfer but it is a very difficult thing to do and only a few are actually successful.

To be honest I had no issues defending D.O. principles until I encountered certain practices not rooted in evidence based medicine which started my dissatisfaction. Although the two degrees are interchangeble I would feel more comfortable if I pursued the traditional path. I can no longer defend what I no longer believe.

I will check with a counselor concerning USMLE II and if that prevents an individual from enrolling in an allopathic school.
Although this would be an expensive path I am willing to pursue it.
Thank you for your input.

---

Dude,
just finish school and apply for MD residencies. Nothing is stopping you from training in any MD specialty training program you are interested in.
Even if you could go back to MD school, and I’m fairly sure you can’t, you’d just be repeating so much stuff you already know. The deal is that if you’ve already matriculated at a medical school no school will allow you into their first year class. Some allow transfers into second and third year, but that is also uncommon. Just graduate and focus on being a doctor, regardless if it says DO after your name instead of MD.

[maroon95]

hello. i failed freshman writing seminar. i am in a postbac program now. do i have a reasonable chance of being accepted to a u.s. medical school?

-maroon95

[ashwin_reddy]

Hello,

I am currently in the medical school application process and wanted to get an experienced opinion about my chances. I have a BS in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (one major, not two) from UC-Berkeley. Thankfully I was not pre-med as an undergraduate because I did not perform well in my first couple of years. Only after graduating and while working for a year in the defense technology industry did I begin taking premedical courses. I also applied to graduate programs in biomedical engineering and am currently taking courses towards a Master of Science in Biological Chemistry at UCLA (switched from biomed. eng. to biological chemistry after a quarter). Here are my stats:

Cumulative undergrad gpa: 3.36
Cumulative undergrad science gpa: 3.61
Cumulative undergrad non-science gpa: 3.18
Graduate GPA (only two courses so far): 3.85

*Engineering grades at Berkeley have pulled down my overall GPA and also affected my science GPA (I had to take Engineering Physics).

MCAT
Verbal: 10
Biology: 12
Physical: 13
Writing: N
Total: 35N

I have received and sent back secondaries from some good and some mediocre schools. However, I have received several rejections and only one interview so far and my concern is growing. Also, I took the MCAT in August of 2003 and therefore am late in the application cycle by 2-3 months. I apologize for the lengthy message but I felt it was necessary to get back a valuable opinion. Your time is appreciated and I’m looking forward to hearing back from somebody.

Sincerely,

Ashwin

[rworkman]

quote:

---

Originally posted by maroon95

hello. i failed freshman writing seminar. i am in a postbac program now. do i have a reasonable chance of being accepted to a u.s. medical school?

-maroon95

---

This is a very difficult question to answer because I only have very limited information about you. Sure, a failure of any kind on your transcript is a red flag, but it is not insurmountable. If this were in a core pre-med science class, matters would be different, but a writing seminar class is not as critical. It does raise questions as to why you failed….maturity problems? Laziness? Adjustment problems during your freshman year, etc. This failure can be mitigated by high performance in other classes as well as strong verbal reasoning and writing section MCAT scores.

Best of luck,

Ron Workman, MD
AdmissionsConsultants
(703) 242-5885

[rworkman]

Ashwin,

Quantitatively speaking, you don’t have a problem. Your GPA could be a bit higher, but it is good overall, and you have very nice MCAT scores. I can tell you that you will frustrate yourself incredibly if you try to crawl into the minds of individuals on the admissions committees at various schools. It is virutally impossible to gauge how your application will be perceived at one school compared to another because different screeners at different schools look for different things in their applicants. Furthermore, whether you are offered an interview depends upon much more than just your GPA and MCAT … your background, maturity, etc. as put forth in your essays are incredibly important. I can’t comment on your specific chances because I don’t know all the details necessary to make such an educated guess (and it would still be just a guess), but I can tell you that several elements of your application appear quite desirable. Try to ride out this process with the understanding that you will not always understand why you did/didn’t get an interview here or there.

If you would like more specific advice, please feel free to contact us at the address/phone # below.

Best regards,

Ron Workman, MD
AdmissionsConsultants
(703) 242-5885

[thymol_blue]

Hey Ashwin,
You’re not doing so badly. Many people are in worse situations than you. With August MCATS, you may still receive the bulk of your interviews in December/January so there is still time to receive invites.
You are likely going to be asked about your poor engineering grades in interviews and you will definitely be grilled about your motivation for switching from engineering to medicine. I hope you already addressed these issues in your pesonal statement and have thought about an answer. Whatever you do, if asked, do not say stuff like, “Engineering is much harder than Biology and so I got poor grades”. It comes off as the excuse of a mediocre student. You are expected to do well in your undergraduate studies, regardless of major. Just be honest about your performance.
Also send schools that haven’t rejected you an update of your grades as you get them. It’s important to show that you are doing well in science classes in grad school.

[PCJamaica]

Responding to what Ashwin said…

I did pretty well on the MCAT’s too (33N). I spent several years with the Peace Corps overseas doing community work. I thought I was a lock. I’ve had a few interviews, and I know it’s too early to say, but I’ve been spurned by a not-great school. I am also getting a little worried. Are you sure I can’t “crawl into the minds of individuals on the admissions committees at various schools”? ‘Cause that would be really great right now. I only applied to 9 schools, so every rejection (and there have been 3 now) is a blow. Solace?

Andrew

[thymol_blue]

Andrew,

In your case, your choice of schools is going to weigh heavily. If you primarily applied to US News “top ten” schools, you might be in trouble. This is simply because they each get 4000-6000 applications from which they select a few hundred people to interview and since they aim to get a 50/50 ratio of male to female, you are really competing for only half of those interview slots. So, at the top schools there might well be 5-6 well qualified applicants for each of those interview slots and whom they pick at that point is somewhat arbitrary. This is why you need to apply to several schools in each tier of competitiveness. In any case, the app. cycle is not over so it may work out for you.

[menkelm]

I graduated from Vanderbilt University in 2001 with a 3.34 GPA. I did not take any pre-med science courses at the time because I had not considered entering the medical profession. I now live in Las Vegas and I will be taking all of the necessary pre-med science courses this fall at UNLV. I have not had any years of volunteering in the medical field. What can you suggest that I should do that would help me get into the top medical schools? Any and all comments and advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time.

[KeeblerElf]

Dear experts:
I am 26yo and am attending Loyola University at Chicago. I have a few concerns/questions about my chances of getting accepted into any medical school:

I will be 28yo when I graduate college from Loyola. Is this a not-so-good thing for medical schools?

Also, I went to another university (UIC)prior to Loyola, and I did terribly: I got a few F’s and even got kicked out of the university for not doing well. I was a “ward of the state” child and it was very tough to make it on my own after high school because I did not have family or financial support. Anyway, after I got kicked out, I went to a community college and got my act together as I got straight A’s in all my courses! I applied to Loyola Univeristy and showed them all my past transcripts(UIC & Community College) and was easily accepted. I was even offered 2 scholarships because of my GPA from Oakton Comm. College. Now this is all great, and I am happy yet concerned that because medical schools are competitive, they will hold my UIC past transcripts against me. I am doing quite well at Loyola maintaining a 3.7 GPA and have a 30 on my MCAT. I know you cannot tell me if I will be able to get into medical school, but could you tell me if I have good odds? Should I put in the effort and money?? I considered other career fields but none has interested ever so much like Medicine. I have a great interest in it. I feels it’s a calling=)

Thanks for taking time out to read my essay here.
Keebler Elf

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