Mend the Rules and Stand Out: Getting Into Medical School
- Andy Turn
- Mar 12, 2015
- 3 min read
Most people reading this will, at one point or another, think about what they are going to be doing 10 years from now. Maybe you want to be designing cars, managing a business, going to law school, or maybe you don’t even know yet what you want to do; either way chances are someone has already told you the exact career path you need to take to get there.
Your relatives might have told you, you may have read it on an internet forum, or maybe your friends were talking about it, but either way there seems to be hundreds of opinions about what test scores are high enough, which firm you should intern at, and which organization you should volunteer for. So what’s the right answer?
From what I’ve found, there are very few right answers when it comes to paving your career path. Of course with grades and tests, the higher the score the better off you will be. Since grades and test scores are often the only way different people are compared, they end up having a huge impact. However, when it comes to what you do in your personal life, you have way more leeway than you might realize. In fact, all you need to do is make meaningful use of your time.
When I was a pre-medical student, it seemed like there was a single set of activities I should be doing. People were telling me which hospitals I needed to be volunteering in, what type of laboratories I had to be doing research in, and what kind of doctors I should shadow. But, I wanted to do more than just premedical activities in college.
Instead of working for a healthcare organization, I interned at an investment bank. Instead of spending my last semester of college taking more science classes, I studied abroad at a business school in Asia.
To my surprise, when I began my interviews no one asked me why I did not do more traditional premedical activities in college. However, people wanted to know what it was like to study business abroad or wanted to hear more about the financial side of healthcare.
It turned out that the admissions committees already had plenty of test scores and grades to compare applicants with one another and once they called us in for an interview, they wanted to see how we could be different.
"Instead of working for a healthcare organization, I interned at an investment bank. Instead of spending my last semester of college taking more science classes, I studied abroad at a business school in Asia."
I encourage you to stand out my fellow peers.
Andy Turn* grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He moved to Los Angeles to earn his B.S. in Biological Sciences at the University of Southern California. While at USC, he explored finance, international business, and technology before finally finding his passion for medicine. He continued his education at Keck School of Medicine of USC where he is currently a second year student. When he is not studying, and preparing to take over the world, Andy enjoys traveling the world, and science fiction movies.
*This blogger has requested to contribute to this blog with a pen name and cartoon image.
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