She Was Rejected from Med School with a 3.8 GPA | Application Renovation (S2 E1)

Today, we're doing a full med school application review for a student who applied last year and wasn't accepted—despite her 3.8 GPA and significant clinical experience! What can we learn that will help YOU with your own app? Application Renovation is back with season two!

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So, our student this week did not get any interviews. She went through the application cycle without much guidance. Looking back, she assumes her biggest issues were her MCAT score and an institutional action on her record.

First, let's talk institutional actions: Many applicants to med school have institutional actions for things like underage drinking. While some med schools don't want to consider any students with these actions, many will accept them if you're able to write about what you learned and how you corrected course. Our student handled it well.

Looking at our student's GPA, she did well, with just one C in biochemistry that took her sGPA down a bit, ending with a 3.68 sGPA and 3.81cGPA.

Her MCAT score was 500. Some medical schools WILL filter out students with an MCAT score that low, but it varies by school. Another potential problem with her MCAT score is that her low section scores were in the hard sciences.

With her activities, she wrote the descriptions with bullet points, which is not a great way to tell your story. It's too easy to fall into just listing off a job description, rather than communicating the impact and meaning to your path in medicine.

We talked a bit about how she should be showing her passion for medicine with stories rather than just saying she has passion. We also touched on the big gap in her shadowing experience, without any hours in recent years.

We talked about how it's generally best to keep activities from high school off your application, and what the exceptions to that rule might be. And with her personal statement, we talked about the need to focus on "why medicine" instead of things like "why I'm going to be a compassionate physician."

Her school list included a lot of out-of-state public schools, which is rough when you have a 500 MCAT score. A lot of public schools are reluctant to consider out-of-state applicants if they don't have a specific tie to the state or amazing stats.

In the end, she should do well if reapplying with a better MCAT score, a better school list, some more recent shadowing, and with descriptions and essays that bring out her story more.

You can check out more episodes of Application Renovation in the playlist at http://applicationrenovation.com/.