Dr. Spence is the Health Prfoessions Advisor at UT Permian Basin

Since students at colleges and universities all over Texas might be reading this, the first thing I need to emphasize is that health profession advising systems differ from school to school for a number of reasons.  Obviously the size of the school influences how the policies, procedures, and staff of the health professions advising offices operate.  At the huge schools like the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University the health professions advising office operates with a large staff of assistants who tend to specialize by program.  At the smaller schools, advising is likely to be handled by only one or a very few people who often have another “main” job.  Here at UT Permian Basin, for example, I am a full time biology faculty member who does the health professions advising as an “extra” service duty; as the advisor I’m a one-man band, doing everything from being the JAMP Faculty Director to licking the envelopes closed when I mail letters of recommendation.

Still, whether large or small, health professions advising offices tend to have certain things in common, and health professions advisors work to achieve the same goal:  to help their students succeed in reaching their goals in the health professions.  For that reason, wherever you are, it is in your best interest as a pre-med to familiarize yourself with the procedures and personnel of your institution’s health professions advising office.  Conversely, it will help you to know what your health professions advisor’s job consists of.  So, what follows is a list of major things your health professions advisor does to help you successfully enter a health professions program:

 Professional responsibilities

 While a health professions advisor is not expected to be himself or herself a medical doctor or other health professional, he or she should know a little something about the health professions, such as the latest issues affecting the health professions and the various specialties or post-graduate education available.

 The health professions advisor should stay familiar with each medical school and other health professional school, understanding their philosophy, mission, and goals.

 Basic characteristics

 Good, dedicated health professions advisors put their effort where it counts.  Understanding the importance of deadlines, they tend to be organized, punctual, and efficient, they maintain good files, and above all they know the value of communication.

 It is of the utmost importance that health professions advisors know their students.  Health professions advisors should be familiar with their students’ academic standing and extracurricular activities, personality, strengths and weaknesses, and from those be able to assess their students’ general aptitude and promise for the health professions.

 Be sensitive, also, to the hardest part of the job that all health professions advisors must face from time to time:  advising the unsuccessful student.  Perhaps the disappointing MCAT score was the result of one bad day, or the bad grade in a course was the result of one bad semester, but perhaps these are indicators of how things might always be.  For the short term difficulty, a health professions advisor can help counsel and support a student past a weak semester or MCAT score.  But if the difficulty, for whatever reasons, looks insurmountable, the health professions advisor must also know when to say, “Let’s consider other career options.”

 Last, you have a responsibility to be an open, willing, and communicative advisee, even if the news is bad.  Visit your health professions advisor regularly to update them on your academic progress, professional preparation, and any interesting extracurricular activities.  The same goes if you are having academic difficulties, if your grades have crashed, or if you were disappointed in your MCAT score, please do not clam up and disappear because you are embarrassed or ashamed for your advisor to know.  Quite the contrary, your advisor can help you decide how to recover from a setback.  Remember, your health professions advisor is likely to be writing the most important of your letters of evaluation when you go to apply to medical school, and he or she knows what to say and how to say it.  Observing and doing the little niceties that keep your advisor up to date will, collectively and in the long run, do wonders for his or her ability to write an informative, thoughtful, balanced, and helpful letter of evaluation in support of you being the best applicant you can be.

Dr. Spence with JAMP interviewees just before the interview day in Lubbock, Texas. (From left to right: Andrew Torres, Dr. Spence, Niray Bhakta.) January 2009.

Greetings,

I am Doug Spence, a biology professor and for the last fifteen years health professions advisor at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin in Odessa.  Trevor asked me if I would write an article for premedicine.org giving advice to pre-meds from an advisor’s point of view, and I’m happy to oblige.

Here is a “top ten” list which, to a greater or lesser degree, sooner or later, affect almost every pre-med:

1.  Recognize at the very outset (beginning as a freshman) that getting into medical school is going to be harder than you could possibly imagine at that point.  If you understand that, and steel yourself to what it will take for the next four years, then you will have a much better chance of actually making it successfully into medical school than those for whom this never quite sinks in.

2.  Conversely, be realistic.  I hate to tell you this, but all the time you were growing up and adults (parents and teachers, bless them) told you, “You can be anything you want to be,” simply is not always true.  It’s great to have dreams, aspirations, and goals, but if you can’t bat, pitch, catch, or field, you don’t have a future in the major leagues.  Similarly, not everybody makes it to medical school.  The hardest part of my job, as I’m sure it is for every health professions advisor, is when I have to tell a student, “Sorry, but I think we need to consider other professional alternatives.”

3.  One of the most fundamental differences between successful and unsuccessful people in general is being a proactive, do-more-than-you-need-to type of person.  Health care is one of the most demanding of all professions, so this especially applies to pre-meds.  Of course, you need to know your limits and you need to be careful not to overcommit yourself, but the best pre-meds establish and maintain a record of being punctual, reliable “go-getters” who go through life doing more than is minimally required.  In short, you want to show how much you can do and how good you can be, not how much you can get away with.

4.  Following from that, realize that as you go through life the impression you make on people will be at least as important in your long term success as your measureable accomplishments.  I’ve known a lot of students over the years who could pull an A in their courses, despite missing every class period or taking advantage of every loophole in the syllabus they could get away with and begrudging having to do that much; I’ve also had a lot who attended every class scrupulously, handed in every assignment punctually, and always seemed genuinely happy to be there, to do anything they were asked, and eager to please, yet could never pull better than a C.  Which group do you think got the warmest and most enthusiastic recommendations from me?

5.  Plan out your academic track, preparing for the MCAT, and applying to medical school as far in advance as you can, and do your utmost to stay on track.  On the whole, it’s vastly more important to make sure you do things right the first time, rather than just to do them quickly, because you just might have to do it again.  This applies to everything, major and minor, from routine class assignments to your progress through your academic work to preparing for the MCAT.

6.  Do not underestimate the MCAT.  Do not underestimate just how long and just how much you need to prepare for it.  Make sure you start preparing for the MCAT early enough and seriously enough that you really have put in as much effort as it takes.  The single most common frustration my students put me through is that I can tell they are not studying for the MCAT nearly as hard as they think they are.

7.  Considering the nature of my job, I don’t like to look like I’m doing a commercial for them, but seriously consider taking one of the various MCAT preparation courses – Princeton Review, Kaplan, etc.  They are not cheap, but reckon the comparative cost of not getting into medical school the first time around and having to do it all over again the next year.  Every student of mine who has taken one of these courses has been glad they did.  Conversely, I’ve had a number of my students over the years tell me, “I’ll study just as hard without taking one of these courses.”  I know you; no, you won’t.  And they didn’t.

8.  Set an achievable target date by which you will be prepared to take the MCAT, and stick to it.  Ironically, in some ways the online MCAT actually works against good MCAT preparation.  Back in the days of the paper-and-pencil MCAT, there were only two test administrations each year, in April and August, and every Texas applicant knew that taking the August MCAT was too late to achieve the “early” application that is so important.  Thus, Texas applicants knew that they just had to be prepared for the MCAT by a certain Saturday in April, despite themselves, with no fall-back position.  So, by the strange twist of logic, they usually were.  Now, the problem is that the multiple administrations of the online MCAT can work against a student’s timely preparation to take it because there is always another MCAT a week or a month later that a student who isn’t putting in adequate preparation can use as a fallback.  I’ve already seen it with so many of my students over the last two years:  “I had originally planned to take one of the April MCATs, but then I thought, ‘That’ll be in the middle of the semester, when I might have a lot of regular exams to study for.  I’ll be so much better prepared if I wait and take one of the May MCATs.  Then as the May MCAT date approached, I thought that I hadn’t had enough time to study for it after school let out, so I cancelled my May registration and signed up for the June administration.’”  Thus, students keep putting off and putting off taking the MCAT, but when they finally do take it, they tend to be no better prepared.  As one of my students last year confessed to me, “After I cancelled one registration and registered for the next one, I realized, ‘I just gave myself another month.  I can go the movies tonight.’”

9.  Everything Trevor says in all his other postings on this website about the importance of submitting your application early is absolutely true.  I tell my students to have their applications submitted and completed to TMDSAS by the end of July.

10.  The whole time you are filling out the application, imagine yourself as a member of a medical school admissions committee looking at your application:  Does your application tell them what they are seeking to know about your aptitude for medical school and the medical profession?  Answer all questions truthfully and openly.  Don’t give the impression that you are withholding information because you don’t want the medical schools to know it, and don’t give the impression that you are rushing through and giving short, perfunctory answers (“not applicable”) everywhere you can get away with it just to get through the application.  On the all-important personal statement, one of my successful students gives this excellent advice:  Start on the personal statement first, and work on it continually as you fill out the rest of the application, because questions throughout the application will constantly remind you to add or revise passages on your personal statement.  Last, print a copy of your application and re-read it before your interviews to remind yourself what you put on it.  You don’t want inconsistencies between your application and the statements you make during your interview.

Dr. Spence can be reached at: spence_d@utpb.edu

Trevor is the Founder of Premedicine.org and the proud advisor to the Dr. Bernard Harris Premedical Society at Texas Tech University

It seems that every year, I advise a slew of students who, for whatever reason, just had their timing completely off when it came to applying for medical school. They took the MCAT too late, or waited until they saw their score before they started the application process, or just flat out waited until the deadline. The trouble with these conversations was and is, is that they’re always done after the person has realized he/she did not get accepted. Applying to medical school and the requisite time line for success varies depending on what each applicant’s circumstances are. Even though premedical students sometimes ask the same questions, they are all vastly different in their overall situation.

My point is that time, as you physics folks should know, is a relative thing. However, there are a few major things that all premedical students would be aware of when deciding when the best time is to apply:

• Where you are in your coursework when the application period begins
• When you are taking the MCAT
• When the application period opens
• Have a general understanding of the Texas medical admissions business

Let’s go through each element in detail:

WHERE YOU ARE IN YOUR COURSEWORK

Make sure that your graduation and/or prerequisite courses will be completed 1 year out from the time you interview.

All applicants should understand 2 major points here. 1.) You DO NOT have to have all of your medical school prerequisites completed by the time you apply, but rather by the time you would matriculate into a medical school. It is in your best interest to have as many of them done as possible at the time of application, but don’t worry if you don’t have them all finished up. This point leads me directly into my second: 2.) It is important that you examine your anticipated graduation date and be very honest with yourself about when you’re likely to be done. Most people apply to medical school when they have approximately 1 year’s worth of coursework remaining. In other words, they hope to be interviewing as they are starting their senior year of undergraduate courses. This is very important because any miscalculation on your part will likely lead to a revocation of your medical school acceptance, if you cannot complete the coursework, by the time you would have started medical school.

All Texas medical schools offer deferments, however, they are usually only offered on a case by case basis and only for unforeseen exceptional circumstances  that have surfaced since you interviewed. So, in other words, don’t gamble on pushing the limits here.

WHEN YOU ARE TAKING THE MCAT

Maximize your MCAT prep time, while balancing that against a good application review time in an admissions office.

Ah, the beloved MCAT. Few premeds would miss it if disappeared. However, if you are truly interested in medicine, you better start to love standardized examinations, because they will just keep coming, faster, longer, and more demanding of your time and money. Taking the MCAT is a complicated proposition these days. In “old days” one had but two choices for administration dates: April and/or August of every calendar year. If you did your homework on this issue, you understood that the August MCAT presented you with several distasteful and unnecessary challenges, so that pretty much squared up the reality of the situation real quick for a prospective medical student.

Since 2007, with the computerized administration of the MCAT becoming the norm, applicants now have 19-22 administrations to choose from. An unintended consequence of this for Texas applicants is the fact that there are seemingly too many to choose from. It’s too easy to pick a date, but then if it doesn’t work out, well, it’s super easy just to pick the next, and the next…

This causes problems on the back end for applicants. The whole process of getting your application in front of a medical school admissions officer is too complicated for this article, but just know that once you get past April of every year, your application is essentially falling behind some of the others in line, and ultimately reduced in the amount of time that it can be reviewed by an admissions officer.

Now don’t be alarmed; taking the MCAT past April can be ok, and that’s my point: The key to registering for the right MCAT administration is this: 1.) Maximize the time you have to prepare so that you don’t short change yourself with a bum score, and 2.) Minimize the time your application is sitting in the “Hold for MCAT” or “Incomplete” pile where it is not being looked at.

My recommendation is to take some sort of formal prep course for the MCAT, and then give your self enough time to take the test and get a good score. Keeping in mind that it takes 30 days to get your scores reported, taking the MCAT in July is longest you’ll want to give yourself. I advise this for 2 reasons: 1.) Medical schools in Texas will begin their application process in early June, so having an MCAT score ready to complete your application at this time is the optimal situation because it allows your file to be under review from the outset. 2.) After July, your scores will not be reported until August, at best 1 and 1/2 months away from the application deadline. Now if you have submitted your application prior to your selected MCAT administration, this isn’t that bad; but most applicants who take a late MCAT have also elected to wait to submit their applications when that score comes in. So, if your application is submitted in August – September and something goes wrong, you could find your self missing the majority of the admissions season. (June – December). This can be the kiss of death. I used to see it happen to people every single year…

WHEN THE APPLICATION OPENS

Don’t be a crazy person about it…

May 1. That seems simple enough, right? When I worked in the admissions office for Texas Tech’s School of Medicine, I had the job of building and maintaining the Secondary Application. Every year, in the wee hours of May 1, I would login to make sure the application was running properly and there would already be 30-50 applications completed. TMDSAS would pretty much always report the same thing. Now, my premeds would tell me at this point, “Trevor, whats your problem? You are always telling us to make an early application…” Yes, this is true, but there is no reason to be pathological about it. Sitting at your computer at 11:59 on April 30 so that you can be amongst the very first to submit your application does nothing for you. The person who submits the TMDSAS application on May 1 gets no more consideration than the person who submits it May 30. This is because none of the first digital and/or imaged records are transmitted to the medical schools until the first or second week of June. So relax, premeds. Go on that date, study for the MCAT or for those wonderful finals that will be coming around the corner at that time.

HAVE A GENERAL UNDERSTANDING OF THE TEXAS MEDICAL ADMISSIONS BUSINESS

Know how admissions offices do business!

Application timing was touched on a little earlier with regard to the MCAT, but this section deals more with your overall application and when to  submit it. I hope it’s now obvious to my readers that an early application is important, but I’d like to detail why exactly — from the admissions officer side.

When an applicant hits the final “submit” button on their Interfolio/TMDSAS application this year, it will take 4-6 weeks for it to make it in front of an admissions officer, and that’s if everything is completed. There is no magical early date for submitting your application, but understand some of the facts before you get started. The application opens May 1. Now I distinctly remember, not all that long ago, in 2002, we (medical schools) started interviewing around Labor Day. It seems over the years, that medical schools have seemingly engaged in a small contest of one-ups-manship of who gets to claim the vaunted status of being the FIRST to conduct an interview day. Now I know people in every medical admissions office in Texas, so i say this affectionately, but with the interviews now starting in July, you, as the applicant need to be a bit more concerned.

I recommend an application submission sometime during May – June. This advice stands regardless of your MCAT status. Even if your MCAT date has yet to appear on the horizon, you still need to get the application in. TMDSAS will process your application with or without an MCAT score. Where it gets held up by not having a score is in the admissions office. This is the optimal situation if you are missing an MCAT when the application period opens.

If you wait for that score to come in and then apply, you have bought yourself 4-6 weeks of lag time during the interview season—and for no reason.

So if you are pushing that MCAT date out, just remember that the best situation is for medical schools to have your application and all of its supporting documents in so that all that’s missing is your MCAT.

One of the most important things to understand about timing is something I used to see sneak up on people who applied on or around the deadline. This is when an application was submitted and then took 4-6 weeks to come in and by the time the tidal wave of late applications was sorted out, a not so funny thing happened on the way to the market: all the interview slots were then full. When I first noticed it, the application  period ended on October 31. Referred to by me as the “Trick or Treat” factor, this was a problem that was very largely rectified by the moving of the deadline to October 1; however, the point still stands. Just because you have awesome academics, etc. and your application is required to be reviewed by a medical school, doesn’t mean there will be an interview slot available should you choose to apply late. This is where knowing the deadlines that admissions officers must adhere to comes in handy.

All medical schools in Texas, except Baylor, must have a rank list submitted to TMDSAS by January 15. Because of this, most of the schools will wrap up their interviewing in December, and those dates are likely to fill up as early as November. Some medical schools will interview in January if it’s necessary; however, I can tell you that is not a preferred method because it turns the days and nights preceding the January 15 deadline, which are already long, into applicant ranking marathons that seem to go on without end.

The final element to this article, which will look like like a glaring omission to an admissions officer at this point, is rolling admissions. Rolling admissions is another topic, for another day, but the fact that an applicant can receive an offer from a medical school as early as November 15, is yet another reason, and perhaps the most important one for getting an application submitted in a timely fashion.

General Eisenhower once said, “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Make sure you have a solid plan for getting through the application process. The sooner you strategize, get your application submitted and completed, the more time you have for success, and perhaps, even more importantly the more time you’ll have to fix the things that will go wrong. Good luck this year!