pre-med activities

How can you take care of others if you don’t take care of yourself? We believe pouring from an empty cup has been a problem in healthcare for far too long. Achieving proper self-care is a challenging yet crucial goal for pre-meds and physicians, especially since medical students have 15-30% higher depression rates than the overall US population.On August 2nd, 2021, we posted an article regarding the state of self-care in pre-med and med students. We interviewed three medical students (from pre-clinical and clinical years) and asked them everything you’d want to know about their self-care journey in medical school. With the start of a new busy semester, it’s the perfect time for you to add self-care onto your to-do list, incorporate it into your daily routine, and make it a habit.

The pre-med path often seems less like a path and more like a smooth-faced, dastardly vertical cliff to climb. Which foothold should we pre-meds choose? How many should we choose in order to stay latched onto the unruly rock? While we all latched onto the plethora of virtual shadowing and clinical opportunities that popped up during the pandemic, is it time to let go? In this interview, Dr. Christopher Behringer surmises how he would have approached shadowing requirements and medical school applications had he been a pre-med right now. Dr. Behringer also discusses the exciting new ways he and the HEAL Clinical Education Network are working to make the pre-med, medical school, and residency paths more integrated than ever before! 

Imagine being a pre-med student in Grant, Nebraska. There are no physicians in your city, the closest clinic is miles away, and you have no connections with anyone in the healthcare field. But your dream is to go to medical school, and all of them require shadowing hours, something you simply don’t have the luxury of pursuing. Physician shadowing is often considered to be one of the most important things a pre-med student can do to prepare for applications and get real-world experience. But while shadowing can be an incredible asset, it’s not always feasible for every pre-med. 

The pre-med years are infamous for their high stress and burnout rates: the striving for straight A’s and 528s on the MCAT, the anxiety of meeting a gazillion deadlines, accumulating shadowing hours, working on those extracurriculars, and much more! As you can probably already imagine, you will encounter many more stressful situations in your journey from medical school to residency and so forth. If not addressed promptly, these elevated stress levels can lead to burnout and empathy erosion over time. Thus, it can be helpful to home in on those stress-management strategies right NOW and give yourself a head start. We’ve collected some statistics to give you a better view of the level of stress medical students endure throughout their journey, and the habits some of them have adopted to deal with the high-stress environment of medical school. 

Do you understand all the challenges that lie between you and your dream medical school? You might recognize obstacles like obtaining a high GPA or taking the MCAT, but there’s a challenge that blindsides many: describing your shadowing experience. Getting shadowing is difficult enough, and its true benefit is often lost through poor or common descriptions. In this article, we’ll provide you with some do’s and don’ts on how to make your shadowing experiences shine while analyzing samples of students’ writing.

“Virtual shadowing is a waste of time.” All of us in the premed community have probably heard or thought this over the past year as we casually sat in our beds and watched clinical shadowing videos. We may also have wondered, does virtual shadowing really count for anything? As fellow pre-meds, we think that virtual shadowing can definitely play a strong role in your medical school applications if applied effectively. Here’s how you can strengthen your application and maximize your medical knowledge by combining virtual and in person shadowing opportunities!

The term ‘holistic’ can be pretty contentious. I’ve even heard comments that pre-meds will “never get in” if they use the word in their essays for osteopathic medical schools (but I have hundreds of past students who’ve proven that wrong). The reason it’s so contentious is that it can have several very different meanings to different people. With that in mind, it’s crucial for you to understand how this term can be interpreted so that you don’t use it in a misleading or confusing way. This article will break down the most common definitions and interpretations of the buzzword ‘holistic’ and give some examples of each. That way, you can make it work effectively for your intentions and purposes in your application.

Regardless of what you think about the term 'critical thinking,' it has unfortunately become a cliche buzzword in the pre-med world. But like most cliches, there is some truth behind it and its importance in the pre-med path. As with most unavoidable pre-med cliches and buzzwords, the key goal is to “make it your own” through specific illustrations and examples from your own personal experiences. In this article, I will simplify something that’s needlessly complex, explain what ‘critical thinking’ really means to you as a pre-med, and show you how you can effectively demonstrate it to medical schools.

In response to the growing concern over systemic racism, certain medical schools, like Miller School of Medicine - University of Miami, added new secondary essay prompts last cycle (2020-2021) that specifically addressed the problems of inequities and how to solve them. Let’s take a look at Miller’s new prompt and consider some good and bad approaches to answering it in your secondary essays.

Other than the COVID-19 pandemic, the biggest news topics in 2020 were police brutality, systemic racism, and the need for greater equity in the United States. The medical school admissions world has joined this conversation, notably through a slew of AAMC webinars and events that focus around the concept of equity in healthcare and medical education. Certain medical schools, like Loyola Stritch School of Medicine, added new secondary essay prompts last cycle (2020-2021) that specifically addressed the problems of inequities and how to solve them. It's likely that these prompts will be featured again in 2021-2022. Let’s take a look at these new prompts and consider some do’s and don’ts about how to answer them in your secondary essays.

Soon we’ll be launching our Best Colleges for Pre-Meds Search Tool - organized by liberal arts, national, and regional - with comprehensive rankings based on pre-med advising, class size, popularity, clinical experiences, and prestige. But we don’t want you to simply take our word for it. We wanted to complement our quantitative analysis with some qualitative evidence. That’s right - we’ve polled actual pre-meds to gather firsthand testimonies about their experiences at their various colleges and derive some meaningful takeaways from the trends in their feedback on their institutions. 

As a pre-med student, your time is precious. You’re writing your secondary essays, practicing your virtual interview skills for AAMC’s VITA, preparing for the CASPer, studying hard for mid-terms, planning your path to med school, and stressing about whether you're good enough to make it in the end. How in the world will you have time to find the information you need to succeed in this application process? The answer: podcasts. Whether you’re studying, driving, or exercising, podcasts allow you to multitask. What better way to kill two birds with one stone? With podcast popularity on the rise, podcasts offer endless options and topics, including the medical school application process, medical education, and medicine. Out of the 700,000 active podcasts, which are most helpful for pre-meds?

You’ll need to meet all the prerequisites to be considered for admission, but you’ll need to go above and beyond to stand out and ensure your chances of getting in. Since you’ll have to go above and beyond, we want this post to do the same thing. We’ll give you all the requirements, BUT we’ll also provide tips and tricks for separating you from the countless other eligible applicants.

We’re not saying that you need to be hyper-obsessive and plan out every little detail, and we’re not saying that you can’t change your mind or take time to explore. BUT getting into medical schools is HARD, and the competition is STEEP, so careful planning will be crucial to your success. And it’s not just about planning in general. You’ve probably heard the phrase “work smarter, not harder.” The same idea applies here. We want to help you “plan smarter” by offering you tips and insights that will give you a strategic advantage.

50 Activities for Your Pre-med College Bucket List