With the Spring semester starting up for college students, those looking to apply to medical school know what's up. While AAMCAS and AACOMAS (the two major centralized application services in the United States) open applications when it actually begins feeling like Spring, pre-med students should be honing in on what schools they are interested in, MCAT studying, and asking for recommendation letters. Seeing your pre-med advisor is very important. You may have met this person once, a couple times, or not at all. You've heard things about him or her. You don't really know what to expect from this process, but at the very least, you expect them to have your best interests in mind. However, is that always the case?
I really started thinking about this when I was in a coffee shop with a friend. She was telling me how her pre-med advisor told her to apply to Special Master's Programs (SMPs). SMPs are graduate degree programs that help strengthen a pre-med application. Such programs do a solid job in preparing students for the rigors of medical school, but they come at a high cost. She divulged details of a 3.50 GPA, brought down from doing subpar in a pre-med class here or there. Regardless, she's a bright individual, so I asked her about her MCAT.
"I ᴅɪᴅɴ'ᴛ ᴛᴀᴋᴇ ɪᴛ ʏᴇᴛ"
WHAT?
Her pre-med advisor told her that her current academic record was not sufficient for either MD or DO schools across the country. Her best bet would be to apply to SMPs, even if she didn't take her MCAT yet.
Let me tell you something. I'm no application expert, but an application is not even close to complete without an MCAT score. It's not even a discussion, unless your GPA was absolutely destroyed. In my friend's case, why would her pre-med advisor tell her to go down such an expensive road? My take on this revolves around quality control.
Indeed, quality control. Your pre-med advisor is in charge of forming a fleet of applicants that have a very good chance of getting accepted in a given cycle. Some "big name" schools are obsessed with their reputation. They dig the fact that they offer a challenging pre-med curriculum, and they will occasionally pop out (often misleading) statistics regarding how their undergraduate students fare in getting accepted into medical school.
Your pre-med advisor wants to preserve that reputation; thus, there may be cases where otherwise qualified prospective applicants are told not to apply to schools based on one unattractive point on their application. Many advisors do not want their fleet to be infiltrated by students with a decent chance of getting in, and in some cases I've heard, they will put their foot down and resist with full force: they will refuse to write a committee letter for the applicant. The committee letter, for those who don't know, is an important and mandatory part of an application to many medical schools because it entails a full-scope recommendation of the applicant. Without a committee letter, many students are left without a clear pathway to medical school. Quality control is not necessarily reserved to the tail end of the pre-med experience either: I have heard of cases where advisors tell students that they are not cut out for medical school based on their first year grades. That's ludicrous. In a perfect world, I want to say that those advisors should know better, but in this current world where universities love their cash flows, I must say that these advisors know exactly what they are doing.
This post may seem like I'm out here to vilify pre-med advisors. I'm really not trying to make that case, for I know that behind every medical student is an advisor who did something right. To the advisors out there, thank you for what you do. The point is that you, as a pre-med student, must be cognizant of the fact that your advisor does not work for you. They work for the college. Plain and simple. Thus, they may have different endgames than you. If you receive advice that makes you cringe, evaluate it and get second opinions. Student Doctor Network and Reddit are not the worst places for preliminary advice, but they aren't the best places either. I'm not getting paid to promote this, but I will refer a great resource to all my pre-med readers our there: Dr. Ryan Gray, of The Medical School Headquarters, has been in this business for years and has helped thousands of students with individualized services, books, and podcasts.
Don't allow bad advice to make or break you. You can do this.
Ezra Guttmann is a medical student at the Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine. Opinions in this blog are of his own. There is no medical advice on this website.
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