When to Push Your Med School Application Back a Year | Ask Dr. Gray: Premed Q&A

It's pretty well known that applying to medical school late in the cycle is a disadvantage. Due to rolling admissions, things get much more complicated after the first few months of the application season. But how late is too late? Today I talk with a student who is trying to apply this cycle, but based on her circumstances, I give her the advice to hold off until next year.

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Our student this week, Hope, is working on finishing her undergraduate degree in 3 years, so she has some questions about application timing, as well as when she finishes her classes vs when she can start medical school.

We discuss a few different issues, but really, my big concern is whether she's going to be applying too late this cycle.

At the time of this recording, Hope was under pressure from her parents to apply during this cycle. But it was looking like her application wouldn't be complete with an MCAT score and verification until September.

September is late to apply to med school, and especially given some other details of Hope's situation:

She has a 3.4 GPA, which is not horrible but also not great. And she has been getting around 500 or 502 on her MCAT practice tests. So her stats overall are not amazing. Late in the cycle, schools are especially looking for those stand-out candidates with above-average stats—the "diamonds in the rough," you might say.

Hope is applying to mainly Texas medical schools, which may give her even worse chances for applying late. We know that 90% of students who get interviews in Texas apply in May, June, and July.

The probabilities are just not in her favor when looking at these details. So I give her the simple advice to push her application back until next year. She will have more time for the MCAT that way and more time to get her letters of recommendation and other details, too.

Her parents' view is that you can just apply again if you don't get in this year, but medical schools really want to see that you improved your application between cycles in that case. So you're making a lot of extra work for yourself—not to mention the application fees—by applying more than once.

Aside from this issue of pushing back her application, we also cover some other med school application details:

She has some questions about how to write about extracurricular experiences where she is shadowing but also gets clinical experience interacting with patients. How do you categorize that on your application? Well, what you can do is actually split it into two different activities on your application and just estimate the hours spent on shadowing vs the hours on clinical experience.

Hope also asks if it's okay for your letters of recommendation to come from community college professors. And what about letters of recommendation coming from professors who are not native English speakers? I address both of these in the video!

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